Join us as product engineer, build our interactive career guide, and help millions of graduates have a greater social impact. $1000 for referrals.
Our aim is to help as many graduates as possible maximise the social impact of their careers. We’re looking for a web product engineer to lead the development of our interactive career guide.
If you’re a good fit, this job is an exceptionally high-impact opportunity.
And the role will give you fantastic self-development. You’ll be taking a major role in a Y Combinator-funded nonprofit, that’s one of the founding organisations in the effective altruism movement, affiliated with Oxford University, and has grown engagement 25-fold in the last four months.
We’re looking for a full stack web engineer with design skills, who’s really into effective altruism, and ready to take the lead on project with huge potential for impact. The position will be in Oxford initially, then we’ll likely move to the Bay Area. Some remote work is possible.
If interested, fill out our short application form and we’ll arrange a meeting to tell you more.
If you know someone else who might be a good fit, ask them to apply and tell [email protected]. If we hire them and we didn’t know them already, we’ll give you $1,000.
What’s the role?
We’ve done four years of research into how to best choose a career with social impact. Now we want to use that research to make the career guide that every socially-motivated graduate uses.
As product engineer:
- You’d lead on building our interactive guide. We’d like to make a straight-forward, fun, personalised process that guides graduates through everything they need to know about having a social impact with their careers, and helps them take action. You can see some initial elements with our career quiz and make a decision tool.
- You’d work with Ben to talk to users, understand our content and figure out what features to add.
- You’d build these features, managing a team of freelancers (and eventually a full-time team) and receiving content from the research team.
- We’re a small team of four (Ben, Will, Rob, Roman), so you’d also have the opportunity to get involved in whatever else most interests you.
Why take the role?
If you’re a good fit, this job is an exceptionally high-impact opportunity.
The reason is the multiplier argument. Think about the next highest impact job you could take. At 80,000 Hours, you can enable more people to make even higher impact positions, having far more impact you would have had otherwise.
We’re recording 10 significant plan changes per month at the moment, each worth over $1 million of social value. With the help of a good product engineer, we think we can grow that to 100 per month in the next year. Read more about our plans and progress.
Moreover, this is an exceptional opportunity to build career capital:
- Skill build – Since we’re trying to grow as fast as we can, you’ll need to stretch your skills in product management, design, engineering and more. We’ll make sure you have great mentorship. You’ll also be able to spend some of your time building whatever other skills you’re most interested in.
- Credentials – You’d be taking a leading role in one of the only non-profits to be funded by Y Combinator. You’ll be able to notch up some impressive achievements.
- Figure out what to do with your life – we spend all our time thinking about this, it’s what we do.
- Learn about effective altruism – we helped to found it!
- Meet amazing people – working at 80,000 Hours gives you great access to people in the effective altruism community, tech community and nonprofit sector, including leaders of multibillion dollar companies, world-renowned academics and people working at the highest levels of government.
Working at 80,000 Hours is also a lot of fun. You’ll get a huge amount of autonomy doing something challenging and meaningful with people who want to make the world a better place.
What other employees have said:
“It’s really exciting to be at the forefront of research on how to do the most good with your career. It’s such an important and neglected area of research, and all our findings are immediately applicable and decision relevant to real people’s lives.”
– Roman Duda“The people I work with are some of the smartest, most dedicated and interesting people I know. I’ve learned so much from them, and the network that I’ve become part of is packed full of ridiculously impressive people.”
– Robert Wiblin“I genuinely don’t think there’s a better place in the world to work if you want to figure out what to do with your own career. The time I’ve spent working for 80,000 Hours has been invaluable and made me realise there are so many more exciting possibilities available to me than I originally thought.”
– Jess Whittlestone
To find out more about our mission, email [email protected].
What are we looking for?
- You have full stack web development experience (a recent App academy graduate is about the minimum). Ideally you also know WordPress, JavaScript, front-end frameworks like AngularJS, how to manage high traffic properties, and how to do analytics and A/B tests.
- You have some product design skills (i.e. some graphic, UX, UI design skills, with experience talking to users, figuring out what features to add and managing the addition of new features).
- You’re really into 80,000 Hours and effective altruism. (If you don’t want to talk about it all the time, this probably isn’t the role for you :).
- You’d like to work here at least two years, and if it goes well, longer. We’re building a huge organisation, so we want to hire people who can run it in the future.
- You’re good at getting a lot of stuff done without much oversight. You’ll have a lot of freedom in the role.
- You’re happy to spend most of your time based in the same place as the team (we’ll be based in Oxford until 2016, then will likely move to the Bay Area), though some remote work is possible.
- You’d like to start at some point between October 2015 and June 2016.
If you’re not sure, the quickest way to find out is to fill out a quick application form and we’ll let you know.
Intrigued and want to find out more, or work with us in the future?
- Read our book, Doing Good Better.
- Read our career guide.
- Get involved in our community and effective altruism. We usually hire from those already involved.
- Stay up-to-date on our progress and other openings. Subscribe here.
How to apply?
- Fill out our quick application form. The deadline is in two weeks – 1st October.
- If you make it through the first stage, we’ll send you our HackerRank test, which takes and hour, and arrange an interview.
- Then we’ll arrange a 2-day trial.
Our aim is to hire by January 2016, but we may move faster or slower depending on how things go.