Senior Software Engineer

About GiveDirectly

GiveDirectly (GD) provides cash grants directly to people living in extreme poverty. Since launching in 2011, GD has raised over $1B, delivered cash to more than 1.

5 million recipients, launched operations in 15 countries, and continues to expand its reach across the Global South. GD has also grown the research base supporting unconditional cash with 20 randomized control trials from its programs, generating rigorous evidence across countries and contexts.

As a result, GD has been celebrated as one of the most innovative non-profit companies byFast Company, while the growing cash transfer movement (and GD’s leading role within it) has been featured in theNew York Times Magazine,This American Life,Foreign Affairs, andThe Economist.

Across our global offices, our culture is candid, analytical, non-hierarchical, and agile. We work alongside 750+ individuals who come from 21 different countries and speak 69 different languages.

Team members at GiveDirectly attest that diversity, equity, and inclusion are not just buzzwords, but a fundamental part of our culture and values.

We actively seek to recruit individuals from the communities we serve, and use DEI as a lens in our hiring practices, programs, and initiatives.

Our goal is to maintain a workplace where everyone can bring their authentic selves to work, and feel valued and respected for who they are.

We strive to be inclusive of all cultures and experiences while upholding our values globally. In the spirit of our "Know Yourself and Grow" value, we recognize there is always room to improve our team's working experience.

But day to day, we aim to "Create Positive Energy" - we take care of one another, have fun, aim to maximize flexibility and accessibility in roles, and pursue professional development opportunities to stay challenged & engaged in our work.

We are proud to be an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other status protected by law.

Location : This role is fully remote but must overlap with an East Africa timezone by at least 4 hours. We are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of employment Visas in the U.

S. or U.K. at this time.

About this role

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.

Reports to : Crystal Li

Level : Senior Software Engineer (internal : Senior Manager)

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.

Priority Application Deadline : June 15

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 automations 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

What you’ll bring :

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

Compensation

At GiveDirectly, we strive to pay our employees generously and equitably. We use an accredited third party salary aggregator to ensure that staff’s total compensation package (base compensation + bonus) falls within the 75th percentile of similar roles, at similar organizations.

We also have a no negotiation policy to ensure we are paying staff equitably across roles.

The United States base salary for this role is $157,500

This role is fully remote, so if you are not based in the US, we will share an estimated salary benchmark for the country you are based in during the hiring process.

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

Read more about our ongoing diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts here and about our decision to move our central support teams to remote first here .

About the hiring process

Format : The hiring process follows the same general outline for all open roles :

First interview (30 mins)Take home skills assignment ( 2 hours)Second interview (1 hour)*Third interview (1 hour)*Final interview (1 hour)Reference checks (30 mins each)

For some roles, second & third interviews are combined into a panel interview. If there are adjustments or variations on this process, those changes will be communicated during the first interview.

Venue : We conduct interviews over Google Meet with camera on (unless communicated otherwise).

Accessibility : Closed captioning is available during all Google Meet interviews, and interviewers will also post interview questions in the chat box throughout the call.

If you need assistance accessing either of these features, please let your interviewer know at the start of your interview!