Senior Software Engineer at GiveDirectly

Job Description

GiveDirectly is the first – and largest – nonprofit that lets donors like you send money directly to the world’s poorest. We believe people living in poverty deserve the dignity to choose for themselves how best to improve their lives – cash enables that choice.

About this role

Technology will play a critical role in enabling the next generation of cash delivery: from identifying recipients without needing to knock on doors to a modern payments infrastructure that gets dollars in recipients’ hands faster and more scalably. We are seeking a software engineer to help design and build our systems for identifying, enrolling, and paying recipients.

You’ll have the opportunity to wear many hats, from driving architecture decisions to building out robust payments infrastructure. Your work will directly help scale GiveDirectly’s capacity to give cash to more people, across more countries, more quickly, while maintaining a high quality recipient experience.

This role will report to the Manager of Programs Engineering and work closely with Technical Program Management and Data teams, as well as cross-functional stakeholders such as Finance and Operations.

Level: Senior Software Engineer

Travel Requirement:  Must be able to travel ~1-2 times per year to one of our countries of operation for team retreats or field visits.

What you’ll do:

Architect and develop scalable systems for enrolling, verifying and paying hundreds of thousands of recipients globally Improve and maintain CI/CD pipelines to streamline the software development lifecycle Collaborate with Product Managers, Technical Program Managers and Operations to design and build tools and automations used to launch payment programs across multiple countries Debug issues across multiple layers of our stack Advocate for engineering-driven investments with a vision for keeping our systems flexible and maintainable to meet the evolving needs of our programs and recipients

What you’ll bring:

Exceptional alignment with GiveDirectly Values  and active demonstration of our core competencies: emotional intelligence, problem solving, project management, follow-through, and fostering inclusivity. We welcome and strongly encourage applications from candidates who have personal or professional experience in the low-income and/or historically marginalized communities that we serve. Language Requirement: English 4+ years of industry experience creating production-caliber software and systems Experience with backend architecture: databases, cloud services, APIs Experience building infrastructure to deploy software Experience with strongly-typed, object-oriented programming such as Java, C#, Go, etc. and scripting languages such as Python, Ruby, etc. High degree of ownership and autonomy – you proactively advocate for ways to improve systems and constantly leave our codebase in a better state than you found it Strong analytical skills and communication – able to break down complex problems, describe technical trade-offs, and collaborate with cross-functional partners (e.g. technical program managers, product managers) Bonus: Experience using Python and AWS in a production environment Bonus: experience with payments/financial software and/or experience with microservice/serverless architecture