Software Engineer

centreforeffectivealtruism; United States; Remote; USD 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) is hiring a full-stack Software Engineer for the Online Team. The role focuses on building web products serving hundreds of thousands of people exploring effective altruism.

You will implement features and fixes, participate in DevOps, and join a weekly on-call rotation. The technology stack centers on TypeScript, Node.js, React, Next.js, Postgres, and Elasticsearch, hosted on Render, Vercel, and Cloudflare.

Responsibilities

• Implement new features and bug fixes for multiple product managers.
• Share responsibility for DevOps and ensuring fast, reliable sites.
• Participate in weekly on-call rotation.

Skills

Full-stack development

DevOps

On-call rotation

Collaborative teamwork

Tools

TypeScript

Node.js

React

Next.js

Postgres

Elasticsearch

Render

Vercel

Cloudflare

PostHog

Job description

We're hiring a Software Engineer to join a growing team building products that reach hundreds of thousands of people thinking about how to do the most good.

This is an individual contributor role on our Online Team, and will be responsible for prioritizing and implementing impactful technical work at CEA. This position reports to the incoming Head of Digital Product. You will collaborate closely with our Senior Software Engineer, Senior Product Designer, and EA Forum Product Lead, along with other teams at CEA as needed.

We're aiming to hire a mid-level software engineer, but we would consider hiring at the senior level for the right candidate.

About CEA

The Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) stewards the movement of people putting effective altruism principles into practice to solve the world's most pressing problems. We're working to build a flourishing future by applying evidence, reason, and compassion to challenges like global poverty, animal suffering, and existential risks.

Our work centers on growing and supporting a global community of people who rigorously analyze where they can do the most good - and take action on those insights. Current strategic priorities include increasing understanding of effective altruism and its principles, growing the number of people who are motivated by EA principles to take significant action to address pressing problems, and diversifying funding sources for high-impact work.

We had significant success in 2025, building momentum within CEA. Our headcount grew from 42 to 66 core staff. Participation in our programs (e.g., events, courses, groups) grew by 20-25% year over year. We merged with EA Funds and are rapidly scaling up our capacity for grantmaking and associated fundraising: our first Fund staffed with full-time employees ( EA Animal Welfare Fund ), raised almost as much as the previous three years combined.

In 2026, we've maintained ambitious momentum while laying the foundations for a step-change in the wider EA ecosystem's growth trajectory from 2027 onwards.

About the Online Team

The Online Team is a small, fast-paced tech and content team with the expertise to build and run web products that help support and grow the number of people engaging with and applying EA principles to their careers, research, and donations.

We own and operate the EA Forum , and provide critical design and engineering capacity for other CEA projects such as the EA Newsletter , the EA Opportunities Board , and our courses . Over the last few years we've also redesigned and rebuilt effectivealtruism.org , funds.effectivealtruism.org , and centreforeffectivealtruism.org .

The EA Forum in particular is one of the EA community building institutions with the widest reach, serving 700K annual visitors. As AI capabilities improve, we're also exploring how integrating AI into CEA's online product portfolio and internal tooling can help us have more impact.

Our team currently consists of Ollie Etherington , Senior Software Engineer, Agnes Stenlund ,Senior Product Designer, and Toby Tremlett , EA Forum Product Lead, and we plan to continue expanding in 2027.

About the role

CEA has ambitious goals for 2027 and beyond, and we need more software engineering capacity in order to reach those goals.

We're now looking to hire a full-stack engineer who can help make impactful improvements across all of our products. You'll be implementing new features and bug fixes for various product managers, as well as proactively looking for ways to improve our online products yourself. You'll be jointly responsible for DevOps, ensuring that all of our sites are fast and reliable, and you'll take part in our weekly on-call rotation.

The vast majority of our code is written in TypeScript and is built on Node.js, React, Next.js, Postgres, and Elasticsearch. Our sites are hosted on Render, Vercel, and Cloudflare, and our analytics data is stored and processed in PostHog.

Some potential projects you may work on

We're deep in the process of migrating the EA Forum codebase over to Next.js - if you join, you can help us establish the next evolution of key EA community infrastructure, which we hope will set stronger foundations for many years to come.

We've recently hired product managers for the EA Opportunities Board and our courses who will continue driving these projects forwards - some of the changes they're planning will require engineering.

EA Funds is now part of CEA, and has not had dedicated technical capacity in a long time. Their team would be excited to collaborate on how to make their processes more efficient using AI (they already have a long list of ideas!)

In 2026, we've massively overhauled our analytics and data infrastructure, and we'd be excited for a data-minded engineer to continue pushing this project forward. Having a strong data foundation will be crucial for CEA's ability to find product-market-impact fit to scale up our products.

CEA is expecting to lean into virtual products in 2027