S-Process Developer

Lightcone Infrastructure is seeking a full-stack web developer to maintain and improve an existing grant evaluation app to make it easier for philanthropists to delegate grant-making decisions to trusted advisors.  The app is currently being used by philanthropists Jaan Tallinn and Jed McCaleb, via the Survival and Flourishing Fund, and we believe it is time to improve it and make it accessible to other philanthropists and cause areas.

Why this position exists

Over the past few years, the interest of large philanthropic donors in improving the long term future of humanity has drastically increased. The central duty of this position would be to develop software and manage a process that allows those philanthropists to effectively and efficiently distribute their funds. 

Duties of position

This position would work on app development full-time, reporting to Oliver Habryka at Lightcone Infrastructure, and advised by Dr. Andrew Critch at the Center for Human-Compatible AI.  Activities will include:

• Implementing and adjusting mathematical formulas for combined decision-making.
• Prototyping and designing visual user-interfaces for manipulating grant evaluations, utility functions and collective decision-making algorithms.
• Working from the Lightcone offices 3-5 business days per week, including daily morning standup meetings (20 mins), weekly 1-1s with Oliver (1-2 hours) and Friday-afternoon retrospectives and product demonstrations (2 hours).
• Meeting with Andrew for up to 2 hours every two weeks, with occasional day-long sprints.
• Performing weekly user-interviews with test-users and present users of the app (2-4 hours/week total).

Our organizational culture

The Lightcone Infrastructure team operates on sprint-based agile principles, with a very strong emphasis on user-interviews, quickly prototyping ideas, and a heavily collaborative atmosphere. In this role, your focus will be on deeply understanding the needs and interests of highly numerate philanthropists who might want to use this application, and it will be crucial to identify a coherent product-direction, while staying responsive and unopinionated about the details of how the application is implemented. 

The Lightcone Infrastructure team fosters the expression of strong disagreements, although this position doesn’t particularly need a person with strong pre-conceptions about how the app should be developed (in fact, they’ll need to be fairly different to early users and advisors).

Qualifications

Coming into this job, you will need to be able to develop software at the level of a strong graduate from a computer science university program.  In addition, you’ll need to possess (or develop) a broad base of other skills, ranging from user-centric product development to UI design to mathematical analysis and development of new algorithms for collective decision-making.  It’s okay if you don’t have experience with those additional skills at the start, but in that you’ll need a high aptitude for developing them quickly.

Salary & Visa Sponsorship

Salary will be at least $150k plus healthcare, and can be negotiated upward to be competitive with full-stack web development in the Bay Area.  We can also obtain H1B visas for this position if need be (or an equivalent E3 for Australian applicants).