Software Engineer (Berkeley, CA)

Civic AI Security Program, a 501 (3) nonprofit; Berkeley (CA); On-site; USD 125,000 - 200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Catered lunch and dinner on weekdays

Visa sponsorship in select cases

Job summary

A nonprofit organization in Berkeley is seeking a Member of Technical Staff to develop innovative AI demonstrations. This full-time position emphasizes creative software engineering, where you will research and build software that showcases AI capabilities. Ideal candidates have experience in full stack web applications and a passion for communicating the implications of AI. The salary range is $125,000 to $200,000, with benefits including catered meals and potential visa sponsorship.

Qualifications

• Experience building complete software projects, especially full stack web applications.
• Interest in showcasing AI implications through software.
• Ability to iterate quickly on projects that communicate effectively.

Responsibilities

• Research, build, and refine software demonstrations.
• Use various AI systems and prototype demos.
• Communicate AI concepts through software and accompanying text.

Skills

Full stack web applications

Creative software engineering

UI/UX design

AI system knowledge

Job description

CivAI is a non-profit that educates policymakers and the public about AI risks using live software demonstrations. To date, CivAI has delivered 100+ briefings to organizations across civil society (on AI-cyber risks, deepfakes, and elder fraud) and the US government (on biological risks, elections, and more). Its work has been featured on national television by ABC News and Scripps News, and in print by the New York Times, the Washington Post, TIME, CNN, and many others.

About the role

As a Member of Technical Staff, you will research, build, and refine the software demonstrations that are at the core of what we do. These will explain both prosaic AI capabilities and more nascent ones that are fast approaching.

This role primarily involves creative software engineering, with flexibility across many domains like interface design, message testing, conducting user interviews, and interfacing with partner organizations.

We'd love to hear from you! If you have any questions about this role, please email us at [e-mail]. The deadline to apply is April 17, 2026.

Refer someone you think would be a great fit for CivAI. If we hire them, you'll receive $2,500 once they've been employed for 6 months. Submit a referral here and learn more about the referral program here.

In this role, you will:

• Build our demonstrations from end to end, acting as an agentic, creative, and conscientious hacker on a collaborative team.
• Write quality software. That includes considered UI/UX, products that are robust to misuse, and performant code.
• Come up with new demonstrations that our audiences will find meaningful. See the Representative Projects section for more.
• Use a wide variety of frontier AI systems and tinker with them when necessary. ML engineering skills are not needed.
• Stay on top of AI progress in order to educate our audiences and inform new demonstrations. You will often read papers and prototype demos reproducing them.
• Iterate quickly on lightweight projects that pack a rhetorical punch, rather than toil for months on a surgical change to an enterprise codebase.
• Communicate understanding about AI through the software and its accompanying text, in the spirit of interactive explainers or data journalism.

You may be a good fit if you:

• Want to help the world understand AI's implications, so that future AI progress is deliberate and beneficial for humanity.
• Have built complete software projects that you're proud of, especially full stack web applications. These can be from jobs, side projects, hackathons, or internships.
• Enjoy brainstorming about creative ways to showcase how AI is going to manifest in the world.
• Enjoy gray-hatting frontier AI systems.
• Care about perfecting the entire user experience, from the look and feel of the UI to the speed of the AI inference.
• Have an opinionated aesthetic sense of what makes a good software API or user interface.
• Are willing to roll up your sleeves and try everything to get something working, even when documentation is sparse and the path forward is unclear.

Representative projects

• A presentation for high level decision makers featuring several demos about loss of control to advanced AI systems, including our recent demo about emergent misalignment.
• A presentation for policymakers showing how frontier AI systems can be used for mass surveillance and bioweapons.
• Our policymaker demos suite, which starts with someone's LinkedIn and makes instant deepfakes of them using a combination of open models, writes personalized phishing emails with Gmail-like UI, creates fake news Tweets and NYT articles, and more.

What this role is not:

• Since our work is primarily making demos and presentations, the role involves relatively little "production app" work like infrastructure management and job orchestration.
• We do not perform novel research ourselves. We follow and communicate research done by others and build mockups of existing systems like AI surveillance tools.
• We do not do ML engineering. The lowest-level work we do is tinker with fine‑tuning and self‑host a few open models.

Salary and benefits

• The role is full-time and on-site at our office in Berkeley. We may be open to remote for exceptional candidates.
• The salary range is $125,000 to $200,000.
• We may be able to offer additional compensation to more senior candidates.
• We provide catered lunch and dinner at our office every weekday.
• We may be able to sponsor visas in select cases.

Application process

• Initial application (15 min) — Resume and optional project links to assess fit. Applications are due by April 17, 2026.
• Come up with a new demo (2 hrs) — Short take‑home task to imagine and technically scope a new AI capabilities demonstration.
• Technical phone interview (1 hr) — Building something cool on a video call.
• Technical discussion (1 hr) — We'll chat about your past work and share more about CivAI.
• Final round interview (3-4 hrs) — Two coding interviews, and conversations with the team.

CivAI is an equal opportunity workplace, and we welcome applicants from all backgrounds regardless of race, color, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, national origin, age, socioeconomic status, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.