Senior Software Engineer at GiveDirectly (GD)

GiveDirectly (GD) aims to reshape international giving - and millions of lives - by allowing donors to provide capital grants directly to the world’s poorest. The Brookings Institution estimates that $70B of cash transfers would be required to eliminate the poverty gap; the aid sector currently spends $135B each year, much of which is allocated to evidence-free interventions. GiveDirectly wants to change that, establishing a benchmark, and in the process accelerate the end of extreme poverty. GiveDirectly has raised over $400M in revenue (>$150M in 2020 alone), while being recognized as one of the most innovative non-profit companies by Fast Company. The growing movement toward cash transfers and GD’s role in that movement have also been featured in This American Life, Foreign Affairs, The Economist, and Business Insider.

We are recruiting to fill the position below:

Job Title: Senior Software Engineer

Location: Lagos (Remote)
Employment Type: Full-time

Job Description

• 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. 

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 automation 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
• 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.

Who you are

• 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.

Why work at GiveDirectly
At GiveDirectly, we work to ensure that you have everything you need to excel in your role and on your team, including:

• A positive and supportive team with opportunities for advancement 
• A demonstrated commitment to helping all staff develop and grow
• A competitive salary, including bonus
• A robust health benefits plan (exact details will vary by country)
• Unlimited PTO (that we encourage staff to take!)
• Desk allowance and flexible work location.

Application Closing Date
Not Specified.