Full-time, Remote, U.S. (with a preference for candidates based in the Research Triangle, NC or Southern California)
Compensation: $180,000 - $230,000 plus meaningful founding-engineer equity
Who we are
Visible or not, your life, like everyone’s around you, is continuously and seriously shaped by the government services you receive. Whether it is a phone call about benefits, a form to stay enrolled in a program, a missed voicemail from a local agency, or a long wait to get a simple answer, how government serves people changes daily lives and lifetime outcomes.
At CivicReach, we are building technology that helps people get the critical services they need.
Our focus is the social safety net. We work with government agencies and nonprofit organizations that help residents navigate benefits, housing, food, child welfare, community resources, and other essential supports. These agencies are facing overwhelming demand, limited staff, outdated systems, and rising expectations from the communities they serve.
CivicReach helps them answer every call, understand what residents need, complete screenings, make referrals, route urgent issues, and capture real-time service needs without forcing staff to do more with less.
We are evolving quickly. We have customers across 6 states, and our product is live and serving thousands of people every week. We are operating critical systems for agencies and helping people get the help they deserve every day.
We have a lot of work to do. We are looking for exceptional folks who care a whole lot about fixing the systems that deliver help to folks in this country.
Who you are
You will be our Product Engineer, an AI builder and CivicReach’s second engineer. You will work directly with our technical CEO and our Head of Engineering. Your job will be to turn our foundational platform into many product lines with many more use cases for everyone we serve.
You will build customer-facing AI capabilities that help agencies serve their communities better. You work across the stack, build clarity, think ambitiously and empathetically about users, understand how and why AI systems behave the ways they do, and use all of those skills to ship product in messy real-world conditions.
What you will do here
- Build AI-powered product capabilities for social service agencies and residents
- Turn customer needs into working software, even when the requirements are incomplete or changing
- Improve CivicReach’s voice AI, screening, referral, routing, analytics, and case-management-adjacent capabilities
- Work closely with customers, community members, and internal users to understand what is confusing, broken, slow, or missing
- Design for edge cases, fallback paths, human handoffs, safety, privacy, and reliability
- Bring a strong point of view about how AI products should behave when they are serving people in high-need, high-stakes contexts
You would be a great match if you have
- Strong, defensible, and grounded opinions about building and reimagining AI-native products and interactions
- Experience building AI “agents”, voice-first systems, RAG architectures, and NLP products.
- Well-calibrated product instincts and user empathy
- Strong instincts around privacy, security, observability, testing, and production operations
- Experience building, shipping, and balancing learning-through-doing with disciplined experimentation in an ambiguous, fast paced environment
- A scientific mindset—you build to test hypotheses, let data update your beliefs, and can say "I was wrong about X, here's what the evidence shows."
- Deep interest in social services, government, civic technology, or public-sector service delivery
- Clear communication habits, especially when articulating tradeoffs or changing your mind on evidence
You will stand out if you have also
- Built production AI "agents" at scale—orchestration, tool use, guardrails, and evaluation infrastructure
- Built software for government, benefits, social services, nonprofits, or other high-trust environments such as healthcare or education
- Built products used by frontline staff or by people navigating crises or other stressful life situations
You absolutely need to have
- Optimism, pragmatism, rigor, transparency, intrepidness, and genuine care for the work and the people it touches
What success looks like
In your first 30 days, you understand the product, customers, architecture, and team workflow. You’ve shipped at least one meaningful product improvement and built trust across the whole team. (We promise, we’re nice!)
In your first 60 days, you own a customer-facing product capability or feature area. You’re showing strong judgment around user experience, AI behavior, and reliability.
In your first 90 days, you’re independently shipping product features from problem definition through deployment. You’re helping CivicReach move materially faster while improving product quality and reliability.
Longer term, you’ll help define what product engineering means at CivicReach as we continue to scale. The natural growth path is toward a top IC or a functional engineering or product leadership position, depending on where your interests develop and how the company scales.
How we work
We are a small team. That means your work will matter immediately.
We care about speed, but hate chaos. We care about AI, but are allergic to hype. Most importantly, we care about users—especially folks asking for help, and agency staff who are often dealing with stressful, complicated, under-resourced systems.
The best engineers in this next era of software are empathetic, scientific builders. You design experiments. You ship to test hypotheses. You use AI tooling fluently and hold opinions about where it helps—and where it doesn’t. You hold a high bar on product quality and reliability, and think carefully about how to measure it. You know how production software works at scale, and you are constantly working at the system level to make the product, the platform, and the systems of shipping code more reliable, more repeatable, and more useful to us and ultimately to our agency customers. You are a technical specialist who moves comfortably across every discipline of the company: research, customer success, design, and sales.
We both share values
- Build Technology for Humans: You believe in the immense power of AI, are skeptical of how AI is often implemented, and want to channel AI done right into tools that help folks who can most benefit
- Invest in our collective success: You are driven by a sense of ownership
- Collaborate With Everyone: You treat users, customers, teammates, and everyone as equal, mission-critical partners. You always seek to bring in voices missing from the table
- Stay Curious: You constantly ask “how might we?” and you seek out creative solutions to challenges other people don’t even notice
- Evolve Toward Excellence: You keep yourself and our team moving in the same direction—to help everyone get the services they need. We all make mistakes and we all keep learning, adapting, and innovating as we go
Compensation
The expected salary range for this role is $180,000 - $230,000, depending on experience, seniority, scope, and cash/equity mix.
Interested?
If reading this job description put a smile on your face and you’re ready to work on some incredibly hard and impossibly worthwhile things, you should apply!
Send us your GitHub, LinkedIn, and something impressive to hello@civicreach.ai (Note: for this hire we're working directly with candidates; recruiters and agencies are not invited)
CivicReach is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate in hiring, compensation, promotion, termination, or any other term or condition of employment on the basis of race, color, religion, creed, national origin, ancestry, sex, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, physical or mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, pregnancy, childbirth or related medical conditions, marital status, military or veteran status, citizenship or immigration status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state, or local law.
CivicReach is committed to providing reasonable accommodations to individuals with disabilities throughout the application and employment process. If you require an accommodation to participate in any part of the hiring process, please email hello@civicreach.ai and we will work with you to meet your needs.
