Your job

We are seeking an exceptional, entrepreneurial founding engineer to make our pilots come to life.

• The impact: CIP steers the trajectory of transformative technologies like AI by example; the technology you build is what makes this happen.

• The people: What you build will demonstrate what’s possible to key stakeholders (e.g. AI labs, governments, etc.), especially as you’ll build it together with them.

• The work: You’ll get to repeatedly build 0-to-1, and more importantly be the kernel of our engineering organization.

Here are your core responsibilities:

• Design and write code for our pilots (initially as the primary engineer). You’d be building from the projects on our roadmap (detailed in this blog post), and shape what future direction we take.

• Shape CIP’s technical strategy and execution, aligning it with the overall mission and goals. You won’t just be writing code, you’ll have high agency over what is built and how, and be consulted on how software fits into the org’s overall vision.

• Test prototypes in high-impact real-world environments. We’ll be leveraging our network of partnerships with organizations across civil society, industry and government.

With that in mind, you might have these attributes:

1. You are a cross-functional engineer: You have defined and built technology people use, and ideally, led engineering efforts/worked with other cross-functional leads.

• You have 4+ years of software development experience.

• You can build and ship full-stack apps independently

• You can act as your own product manager or designer as needed.

2. You have experience developing with generative AI. You are interested in the trajectory of AI development, have learned how to work with generative AI, and have thought about how these tools and their development could be used for good. (Many CIP projects benefit greatly from LLM experience.)

3. You are deeply aligned with our mission: You believe that advancing collective intelligence, especially to steer transformative technologies in the public interest, is important and interesting.

4. You are agentic: You are excited to work on small, collaborative teams that have flexible remits and fast feedback loops.

• You like to build prototypes and put them in front of people.

• You thrive given the agency to define what you work on.

• You like to balance what is visionary and what is pragmatic.

An important general note on what we’re looking for: We definitely don’t expect that you have to be an amazing product designer, full-stack SWE, hacker-brained prototyper, technical lead, and AI expert wrapped up into one, to be hired. What we do want is for the founding engineer to have cross-functional strengths across some subset of these skills, but there is flexibility about which subset!

Logistics

• Location: The role is in-person in San Francisco. We work together in the office multiple times per week.

• Compensation: We expect salaries offered to be $150-180k, and will account for relevant experience. A successful candidate should also expect compensation to increase with time spent in this role.

• Benefits: Health & dental insurance (& more that we’re getting off the ground as we speak!).

• Role & Title: We can consider variations on responsibilities or title depending on desired career path and experience. You would be our most senior technical person, and we want to work with you to shape the job.

Application Process

• Fill out this interest form with your resume and some answers to a few background questions.

• Deadline is rolling until filled, but we are prioritizing filling this role so please send your application as soon as possible.

• The process starts with a phone screen, followed by a technical interview, a behavioral interview, and a paid take-home to discuss.

• We’ve planned our technical interviews & take-home to test a variety of skills across product and engineering. As mentioned, you don’t have to be excellent at everything, but we want to understand the landscape of your skillset, the edges of your knowledge, and what you’re particularly great at.

• At the later stage, we’ll schedule a few longer conversations with the team so we can mutually get to know each other, and reach out to references.