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Staff Software Engineer

Engineering | Remote | Full-time

ROOST aims to offer competitive compensation and benefits based on experience and region. In the US, the range for this role is $210,000 - 270,000.

Robust Open Online Safety Tools (ROOST) is seeking its first Staff Software Engineer to join our team in building the safety infrastructure for the AI powered internet. As a member of our team you will lead designing, implementing, and optimizing large scale open source safety systems.

Robust Open Online Safety Tools (ROOST) is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to join our team in building the safety infrastructure for the AI powered internet. As a member of our team you will lead designing, implementing, and optimizing 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 technical leader in the engineering team, you will be responsible for making design decisions and managing execution timelines as well as quality. You will communicate with the community as well as the users of our infrastructure to explain the design choices, project 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

  • • Bring the best of safety technology for the users of ROOST tools
  • • With the Chief Technology Officer and the Technical Design Committee, develop a prioritized list of safety tools that ROOST will build
  • • Lay out the technical architecture and design choices for the tools being developed like high throughput rules engines (Osprey), review tools (Coop), ML platform for supervised and unsupervised learning, and evaluation systems for classifiers and datasets.
  • • Drive engineering decisions including system design, performance, maintainability, and implementation trade-offs while building well architected platforms that can be extended
  • • 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
  • • Create and model an engineering culture of high quality execution and teamwork through the full project lifecycle. This includes participating in product design; owning 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
  • • Ensure maximal cross-platform compatibility and flexibility by building systems that can be deployed across high-scale social platforms and resource limited organizations
  • • Evaluate and incorporate user and contributor feedback into the projects

Required Qualifications

  • • 8 years of experience in software design and development and at least 5 years of experience designing, building, and optimizing large-scale infrastructure like API services, storage, data processing, or ML platforms.
  • • Attention to detail in focusing on reliability, scalability, security, and continuous improvement
  • • A language polyglot – comfortable learning and working in new languages – and familiar with common infrastructure and high performance systems languages like Python, Go, or Rust
  • • 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
  • • 3+ years of experience in a technical leadership role leading project teams and setting technical direction
  • • Experience designing, analyzing and improving efficiency, scalability, and stability of various system resources
  • • 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: Chief Technology Officer

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 "Staff SWE - [Your Name]" in the subject line or click the button below.

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