Founding Software Engineer

Job Title: Founding Software Engineer
Reporting To: Executive Director
Job Type: Permanent, full-time
Location: Remote (working from home, preference for Utah Wasatch Front for occasional offsites)
Salary: $105k - $130k/yr based on fit, experience, and location
Benefits: Full coverage of family health and dental insurance, 22 vacation days (PTO + holidays) per year 
Applying: Interested candidates may send a resume to Chris Pope (public@cgcharitable.org)

Our Foundation
CG Charitable is a private US family foundation established in 2004. Our DNA mixes prior Silicon Valley careers with faith in the power of education to raise people out of desperate poverty. We seek to dramatically improve education and employment outcomes for vulnerable populations in East Africa and Central America. To date, we have distributed $63 million toward this mission. We are data-driven and determined to support efficient organizations who measure and validate their impact. As an organization, we are respectful but very direct, thorough without formality, and constantly improving. Every year feels new.

The Goal
Your primary job will be to design, build, and maintain a long-term beneficiary tracking platform for pilot launch in East Africa. This platform will record mission-critical data from dozens of organizations and tens of thousands of individual beneficiaries, many in very remote locations. You will also develop a web-app replacement for our Google Sheets-based due-diligence process. Finally, you will implement integrations to remove friction from our data engineering and reporting processes.

This is a highly consequential role. You will initiate our organization’s evolution toward creating technology solutions for our partner organizations. Your guidance will include helping to define and implement our development stack, engineering workflow, codebase standards, and documentation.

The Approach
You will be our first fulltime developer. Even so, we believe existing technologies can enable you to create what we need. We expect you to fully leverage cutting-edge tools and practices including carefully incorporating AI into every layer of what you do, from architectural guardrails, to code creation and maintenance, to testing, monitoring, and documentation. We provide subscriptions to Cursor, Claude Teams, and other leading tools. You will leverage as many applicable paid services and open-source solutions as possible (fully hosted PaaS, authentication, DB, payments, etc.) to prioritize your time and attention toward solving unique problems. The architecture, codebase and engineering workflow must be transparent and easily intelligible to both human and machine audiences. We expect you to build systems that other technical staff can easily navigate and use.

Your Experience, Skills, and Aptitude
Your ability to learn and switch hats will be as important as your work experience given that 1) CG Charitable is too small to hire for narrow skill domains, and 2) the outside technical landscape is changing very quickly. Your work will draw on (or quickly develop) expertise across the following areas: 

Communication
    - You will be a technical educator and skilled communicator to the rest of the team. We work from home but not in silos. The Executive Director and any future technical staff must thoroughly understand what you create.

Design
    - Translate our roadmaps, requirements, and feedback from the field into architectural options and tradeoffs. Clearly communicate these options at an executive level and document decisions both visually (e.g. UML) and verbally (e.g. agent.md docs). 
    - Care deeply about DX and UX. Make both the final product and the process that creates it beautiful and intuitive for others.

Workflow
    - Translate design decisions into discrete tasks with clear specs. Integrate human and agentic code reviews and tests into an effective project tracking and CI/CD workflow.
    - Leverage an agent-centric IDE with leading models to enable agents to do what they’re good at (e.g. feature scaffolding) while guarding against their weaknesses and minimizing technical debt. Know what can be fast and what needs careful time; adapt each category to new realities. 
    - Create effective tests. Know which tests can (or shouldn’t) be automated. 
    - Work across dev, test and production environments while containerizing everything for environment-agnostic deployments. 
    - Integrate production monitoring and issue resolution into daily work.
    - Maintain very clear workflow documentation.

Product
    - Frontend development employing a leading JS framework (our bias is toward Angular). Heavy emphasis on forms, data validation, state management, and data visualization. 
    - Clean, robust Postgres backend. Experience with ORM tools and Zod a plus. 
    - Beautiful, responsive CSS.
    - Develop diverse frontends (e.g. desktop browsers and WhatsApp on mobile). 
    - 3rd party authentication via Clerk or similar. Complex row level role-based security. 
    - Integration of payment rails using different providers depending on region.

Join Us
If you're energized by hard technical problems that really impact lives, this role is a rare opportunity. You'll be architecting systems from the ground up and shaping how a data-driven foundation tracks life-changing programs for tens of thousands of people. You’ll deepen your experience with industry-leading tools while planting the technical roots that CG Charitable will draw on for years to come. We are open to candidates with fewer years of experience if they have unusually strong judgment, communication skills, and the ability to operate effectively across the entire stack. If you fit what we need and this opportunity resonates with you, we’d love to connect.