GiveDirectly is the first and largest non-profit organization that allows donors to send money directly to the world’s poorest. We champion the belief that people living in poverty deserve the dignity to choose for themselves how best to improve their lives, a choice that cash transfers enable.
Role Overview
As a Senior Software Engineer, you will be crucial in designing and building scalable, reliable systems that underpin GiveDirectly's core operations. This includes developing donor platforms, systems for delivering payments directly to recipients, and crisis response tools capable of reaching hundreds of thousands of people globally.
Key Responsibilities (What you'll do)
- Design and build scalable, reliable systems that power our core operations—whether that’s donor platforms, systems that deliver payments directly to recipients, or crisis response tools reaching hundreds of thousands of people globally.
- Own end-to-end development of new features and services, from architecture through deployment and monitoring.
- Improve our developer workflows by strengthening CI/CD pipelines, reducing manual steps, and increasing test coverage.
- Collaborate with cross-functional teams (product, ops, data) to understand real-world needs and ship tools that directly support program delivery in the field.
- Debug and resolve production issues across our stack, with a focus on root cause analysis and long-term fixes.
- Advocate for sustainable engineering practices, including testing, documentation, and monitoring.
- Help shape our tech roadmap with an eye toward scale, maintainability, and recipient experience.
Required Qualifications and Experience (What you’ll bring)
- Experience: 4+ years of industry experience creating production-caliber software and systems.
- Education: BA/BSc/HND qualification.
- Technical Expertise:
- 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.
- Core Competencies & Values:
- 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.
- 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).
- Language Requirement: English.
- Bonus Experience:
- Experience using Python and AWS in a production environment.
- Experience with payments/financial software and/or experience with microservice/serverless architecture.
