Senior Software Engineer, Public Spaces Incubator

New Public is a nonprofit R&D lab that's reimagining social media. We're a team of researchers, engineers, designers, and community leaders working together to create digital public spaces that connect people, embrace pluralism, and build community. We are seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join our team! In this role, you will play a key part in building our PSI platform, working closely with our Principal Software Engineer and engineers from partner public media organizations.

Our Public Spaces Incubator (PSI) is developing a platform for prosocial public conversation. We have already created and beta-tested a platform, but now we need to turn it into a flourishing, scalable, secure, robust, and accessible conversation product. You will help implement the front end, back end, AI models, and metric systems behind the PSI product, ensuring the system is usable, scalable, high performance, secure, robust, and leads to good social outcomes.

As a Senior Software Engineer at New Public, you will work closely with designers and product managers to build a compelling end-to-end user experience. You'll also collaborate with developers at partner institutions to help onboard them onto our codebase, review their contributions, and provide support. Additionally, you will work with user experience researchers and social scientists to help understand the social behavior that results from our system.

We are looking for a smart, enthusiastic generalist with experience building and shipping real products, preferably in a fast-moving startup environment. You should have excellent communication skills and the ability to collaborate effectively with cross-functional teams. Some experience with React Native, Node.js, NoSQL databases, and LLMs is ideal, but it's okay if you're still learning these tools.

This role requires the ability to quickly figure out what's essential and what can wait, helping us ship things fast and iterate based on real user experience. You should be able to design cleanly structured modular architectures that will stand the test of time and be easy for other engineers to work on. Comfort with learning new technologies fast is essential, as is strong product sense to work directly with designers, researchers, product managers, and partners to improve the product.

If you are passionate about building digital spaces that serve the public good, create community, and help people with different backgrounds understand each other, we encourage you to apply. This is an opportunity to make a significant impact on the future of digital public spaces and contribute to a diverse and inclusive work environment.