Engineering roles

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Overview

Survival and Flourishing Corp builds software for funders and grant evaluators, including the grant evaluation platform used by the Survival and Flourishing Fund. Our tools help philanthropists delegate grant-making discussions and decisions to trusted advisors, supporting more effective and impactful giving.

Our team of three engineers currently maintains three production web apps, including one with an iPhone and iPad app used by funders. These applications handle sensitive grant, evaluator, and funder data, and we have more software in development.

We’re hiring for four engineering roles: Full-Stack Software Engineer, Security Engineer, Design Engineer, and QA / Testing Engineer. The annual salary range for each role is $250,000–$350,000.

All four roles contribute to general engineering. The security, design, and QA / testing roles each have a specific focus that we expect to occupy roughly half their time, with the rest spent building and maintaining our applications. The security role starts with an initial period of full-time security work, described below.

Apply using the form at the bottom of this page.

Full-Stack Software Engineer

Build and maintain our applications, with a focus on the grant evaluation software used in the S-Process. This role spends its time on general app development, working across the stack to deliver features and improve the reliability and usability of our tools.

What you’ll work on:

  • Building features across the frontend, backend, and database
  • Implementing and adjusting mathematical formulas for combined decision-making
  • Prototyping and building visual interfaces for grant evaluations, utility functions, and collective decision-making algorithms
  • Improving the correctness, reliability, and usability of our existing applications

Relevant experience: full-stack web development and ownership of features from design through production. Numeracy and an interest in mathematical decision-making tools are particularly useful for this role.

Security Engineer

Own the security of the software we build. We want to harden our platform against increasingly capable AI-assisted attacks while protecting the sensitive grant, evaluator, and funder data entrusted to us.

We expect you to spend your first 2–6 months working full-time on security, then roughly half of your time on security and half on general engineering.

What you’ll work on:

  • Strengthening authentication, authorization, and access controls across our applications
  • Securing secrets, dependencies, and infrastructure
  • Identifying and addressing security risks in AI-generated code
  • Securing LLM features that interact with sensitive data
  • Prioritizing security improvements and helping the team build secure software as our platform grows

Relevant experience: an engineering background in software security, with experience identifying vulnerabilities and implementing practical protections in production applications.

Design Engineer

Shape how funders and grant evaluators use our tools. We’ve found it valuable to have someone focused on designing features, from understanding user goals to making sure the finished software feels polished.

We expect you to spend roughly half of your time on design and the rest contributing as a developer using TypeScript and React. Designs can start in Figma or directly as working prototypes.

What you’ll work on:

  • Modeling user goals and journeys to guide feature design
  • Designing UI and UX for complex grant evaluation and funding workflows
  • Exploring and communicating designs through Figma or working prototypes
  • Implementing features in TypeScript and React
  • Owning visual polish before we roll out software

Relevant experience: designing thoughtful user experiences and translating them into working software, with strong visual judgment and skill in TypeScript and React.

QA / Testing Engineer

Own and expand the tools we use to verify our software. We already use unit tests, end-to-end and snapshot tests, and manual QA. We want to broaden that coverage with AI agents that test running applications and help us build more comprehensive automated test suites.

We expect you to spend roughly half of your time owning QA and testing tools and the rest on general engineering.

What you’ll work on:

  • Building automated and agent-driven systems that test our applications at scale
  • Using AI agents to carry out exploratory and manual-style QA against a running app
  • Using AI agents to help write unit, integration, and regression tests
  • Broadening coverage alongside our existing end-to-end, snapshot, and manual testing
  • Making test results reliable and useful for engineers investigating bugs and preparing releases

Relevant experience: building large-scale automated or agent-driven test systems, along with the engineering skills to improve the applications those systems test.

Shared engineering qualifications

Across all four roles, we’re looking for experience or clear skill with:

  • Full-stack web development
  • Management of user accounts, roles, and access controls
  • Database management and ensuring the privacy, consistency, and correctness of sensitive data

Numeracy is desirable. Our software supports quantitative grant evaluation and decision-making. Familiarity with calculus, numerical computing (for example, NumPy or PyTorch), or utility theory is useful, but is not a prerequisite for these roles.

We also value experience with:

  • Prioritizing and tracking the completion of features and bugs through a ticketing system
  • Maintaining code quality through testing, linting, and code review
  • Monitoring service health and participating in an on-call rotation
  • Communicating with leadership about progress, estimates, implementation tradeoffs, and the impact of design decisions

Tech stack

We use the following technologies. You don’t need experience with every tool; the design engineer role specifically calls for TypeScript and React skills.

  • TypeScript and React
  • Python and Bash for scripting
  • Linux VMs running on GCP
  • Socket.IO and Express
  • Tailwind
  • Sentry
  • Postgres and Prisma
  • GitHub and Linear
  • NextJS and Vercel
  • Claude Code and Codex

You’re a great fit for our team if you are:

  • Self-driven: you can own projects and get things done without outside prompting
  • A great team member: you stay in sync with team priorities through communication, and support/unblock the work of teammates
  • Rigorous: you’re detail-oriented and thorough in places where consistency and correctness are key
  • Pragmatic: you understand when rigor is unnecessary and can move quickly
  • Opinionated: you have clear taste and can justify your ideas to teammates
  • Open-minded: you care more about becoming right than having been right in the first place
  • Versatile: you may be an expert at performance engineering, but you can also write React or AppsScript

Our work and team

Our grant evaluation software has been used by philanthropists including Jaan Tallinn, Blake Borgeson, and the Future of Life Institute through the S-Process of the Survival and Flourishing Fund. We want to make our tools more information-dense and less cognitively taxing, enabling funders and evaluators to engage in more impactful giving.

We have a clear roadmap of high-value features and are expanding the team to build more, faster. You’ll collaborate with SFC Co-Owner Andrew Critch, CEO Ethan Ashkie, Lead Engineer Joel Burget, and the rest of the engineering team.

In every role, we value teammates who communicate regularly, support each other, and are willing to take on the practical work needed to keep our applications and projects moving.

Salary and benefits

The annual salary range for each of these roles is $250,000–$350,000.

Benefits include:

  • Fully funded individual health, vision, and dental insurance
  • Majority premium coverage for additional dependents
  • Available health/wellness discounts and perks through the health insurance provider
  • 6% Safe-Harbor 401(k) matching
  • 9 weeks off per year, including PTO and holidays
  • 12-week paid family leave

Organizational culture

SFC is a small team that works fully remotely; we do meet 2-4 times a year for an in-person week, usually in the Bay Area. We have a clear vision that we are ready to execute, and are looking for talented engineers to help make it happen.

Work authorization

SFC does not have a standard process for applying for visas, but we can hire remote contractors to live and work outside the United States.

Application

Use the application form below to apply for the engineering role or roles that interest you.

Apply here