Position overview

We're looking for a thoughtful, collaborative Senior Software Engineer to join this project as it grows, acting as the primary backend and AI engineering contributor through its next stage of development. Reporting to the Institute's Head of Engineering, you'll have significant influence on technology decisions, engineering culture, and our evolving platform. This is a remote-friendly role, but ideal candidates will overlap at least four hours with Pacific Time working hours. Most team members are in the SF bay area and some are in the UK/EU. Currently, the role does not involve an on-call rotation, and we are unable to offer visa sponsorship.

About Talk to the City

Talk to the City is an open-source, LLM-based platform for distilling insights from large-scale public input, with previous partners including Taiwan's Ministry of Digital Affairs, international peacebuilding and advocacy groups, and labor unions. The project has rapidly gained visibility in the deliberative technology community, with frequent requests to present our work and help potential partners understand the opportunity it presents. Our ambitious goal is to create a platform for scalable deliberation: capturing the power of citizens' assemblies in mediated space.

Product site    •    Executive summary   •    Presentation (2024)

Responsibilities

• Plan, implement, and maintain platform services focusing on reliability, simplicity, and security

• Collaborate with a close-knit team to spec impactful new features and understand how best to meet our partners’ needs with our current resources

• Lead efforts to improve developer experience, increase observability and testability, and modernize infrastructure patterns and stack choices

• Expand our evals and monitoring to increase LLM performance, consistency, and safety

• Engage with open-source contributions from external engineers
  

Required qualifications

• Several years of production backend software engineering experience, particularly Node.js/TS and Python

• Solid understanding of relational and nosql databases, particularly Postgres and Firebase

• Practical experience with containers in cloud environments, particularly GCP and Heroku

• Experience with LLM API integrations and safety

• Excellent written and verbal communication, strong empathetic and strategic thinking
  

Preferred qualifications

• Proven ability to work asynchronously, solve complex technical challenges, and contribute to cross-functional teams

• Significant knowledge of LLM frameworks and testing

• Startup experience, especially scaling stage

• Interest in engineering culture and process development

• Occasional travel to SF Bay Area for team events

• Experience with telephony platforms, particularly Twilio

• Experience in civic technology, social impact technology, or consumer research
  

What We Offer

• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision benefits

• Flexible work arrangements, remote-friendly culture, unlimited PTO

• Professional development opportunities

• Meaningful work with direct social impact

• Collaborative team environment with opportunities for growth
  

Application Process

Please submit an application by filling out the form linked below. We are looking for an immediate hire, so applications will be accepted on a rolling basis.