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Software Engineer or Senior Software Engineer

Engineering | Remote, Global | Full-time

ROOST aims to offer competitive compensation and benefits based on experience and region. In the US, the range for this role is $160,000 - 240,000.

Robust Open Online Safety Tools (ROOST) is seeking Software Engineers to join our team in building the safety infrastructure for the AI powered internet. As a member of our team you will contribute to designing, implementing, and optimizing large scale open source safety systems. Note - This posting is for multiple software engineering roles, both at the Software Engineer and Senior Software Engineer level. Level and area of focus will be determined in the interview process.

Robust Open Online Safety Tools (ROOST) is seeking Software Engineers to join our team in building the safety infrastructure for the AI powered internet. As a member of our team you will design, implement, and optimize large scale systems for online safety, like rules engines, review tools, and ML platforms for supervised and unsupervised classifier training. You will work closely with ROOST’s team members including our growing engineering team, our Technical Design Committee, and the open source community of contributors. As a member of our engineering team, you will be responsible for leading projects, managing execution timelines while making decisions about scalability, quality, and usability. You will communicate with the community as well as the users of our infrastructure to explain the project capabilities, status, and listen to feedback for improvement. If you are passionate about online safety, excited about the open source mission, and able to work with a diverse group of developers, this is the role for you.

What We're Building

ROOST is creating foundational infrastructure for a trust and safety workflow. This is the infrastructure that enables an organization to detect policy-violating content or behavior, then route, review, enforce, and log that content and or behavior. This is a system that’s heavy on data ingestion and processing, enforcing user-defined rules, and must be performant at scale. We also know AI is creating new challenges and opportunities for online safety; we’re building tools that are resilient and relevant to these changes. ROOST’s drafted, near-term roadmap is publicly available, as is the investigation and rules engine, Osprey.

Key Responsibilities

  • • Lead the development of ROOSTs online safety infrastructure projects.
  • • Drive decisions for best engineering choices for scalability, interoperability, extensibility, and maintenance. Make implementation decisions and trade-offs in consultation with the engineering team and the CTO.
  • • Bring technical leadership and experience to the software engineering project and be responsible for getting user and community buy-in to engineering decisions.
  • • Collaborate with diverse stakeholders including trust and safety teams, open source community, and academic researchers
  • • Mentor and provide guidance to developers, community members, and the users of ROOST's tools
  • • Participate in an engineering culture of high quality execution and teamwork. This includes participating in product design and milestone planning; instilling code quality, rigor, testing, and monitoring; and ensuring quality developer experiences through documentation.
  • • Manage timely development and shipping of tools with predictable features and bug fixes
  • • Evaluate and incorporate user and contributor feedback into the projects

Required Qualifications

  • • 3-5 years of experience in software design and development and at least 1-2 years of experience building large-scale infrastructure like data processing, analytics, or ML platforms
  • • Exhibits attention to detail in focusing on reliability, scalability, security, and continuous improvement.
  • • A language polyglot – comfortable learning and working in new languages. ROOST’s current toolstack is Python and Typescript, with user-created rules in a SQL-adjacent format. Future tools are likely to use common infrastructure languages like Python, Rust, and Go.
  • • Proven record of working with disparate teams and individuals, understanding issues, and making decisions and communicating them transparently

Preferred Qualifications

  • • Understanding of the open source ecosystem and prior contributions to OSS
  • • Experience designing, analyzing and improving efficiency, scalability, and stability of various system resources
  • • Prior experience building or maintaining machine learning platforms
  • • Prior experience in startups, nonprofits, and/or small team environments

Benefits

  • • Premium health, dental, and vision coverage for employee and dependents
  • • 401(k) with matching
  • • PTO
  • • Remote-first work environment with flexible hours

Reports to: CTO

How to Apply

Please share your resume and a brief note about why ROOST's mission resonates with you and how your experience could help us advance it.Send these materials to hiring@roost.tools with "SWE - [Your Name]" in the subject line or click the button below. Send these materials to hiring@roost.tools with "Staff SWE - [Your Name]" in the subject line or click the button below.

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