Founding Engineer

Who we are

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Visible or not, your life, like everyone’s around you, is continuously and seriously shaped by the government services you receive. Whether it be certain checked boxes on tax forms, phone calls to retain medicaid benefits, or long lines at the DMV - how, where, and when our governments provide for us changes our daily lives and our lifetime goals. At CivicReach.AI, we’re creating more (and more human) access to government services for everyone.

Our starting point is the CivicReach platform - trainable voice AI agents built specifically for local government offices. Our platform is designed to create accessible, equitable, and affordable customer service interactions for government offices. We help offices that are understaffed and not always able to answer resident phone calls and provide a customer service channel, over the phone, that enables real-time sentiment analysis, multilingual responses, and proactive service delivery.

We are an pre-seed stage startup that grew from a mission to fix a root issue with democracy in America - our falling trust in local government. We are proudly backed by:

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• National League of Cities,
• the GovAI Coalition,
• CivStart,
• NC IDEA, and
• NextWave.NYC

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We also are actively hiring our founding team - the first few folks who will shape our platform, mission, and our ultimate success.

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We have a lot of work to do–and that is where you come in! We are looking for exceptional folks who care a whole lot about fixing government, are both enduringly optimistic and rigorously cautious about emerging technology, and want to spend their time making a difference in communities all across the country.

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What you will do

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You will be our Founding Engineer, which means you’ll be our first or second hire and report directly to our Founder and CEO (who is a software engineer himself). Your primarily responsibility will be to execute an AI-first product roadmap across a full engineering and data stack. You’ll own and be hands-on keyboard for the entire product development and deployment process. Our success will be because of your ability to balance an elegant and production scale platform with agile and scrappy ways of getting things done.

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Technical Product Strategy and Vision

• Collaborate closely with the Founder and CEO to define and articulate platform architecture, product roadmap, and overall technical vision.
• Co-own technical product details, implementation decisions, frameworks, and processes.

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Hands-On Product Engineering

• Lead the agile development of our platform, including backend software development, API development, frontend development, and third party integrations.
• Build on AI tools like large language models (LLMs), natural language understanding (NLU), and generation (NLG).
• Implement infrastructure best practices for scalability, security, and data privacy.

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AI and Data-First Development

• Aggregate and store proprietary data from our platform and third party sources.
• Build with and on top of data analytics, data warehousing, and data pipeline tools.
• Stay up to date on language model-specific AI frameworks, general AI research, and best practices across data, and full stack engineering.

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User-Centric Design

• Participate in user research - understanding how residents want and need to connect with their local government to receive information and services.
• Analyze user interaction and assessment data to make informed decisions for product improvements.

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You are someone who

You would be a great match for this role if you have:

Experience:

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• 2+ years as a former early-stage (zero to one) startup founding engineer / CTO (we are partial to hires #1 - #10),
• or 7+ years as a fullstack software engineer with a deep understanding of startups.
• and custom AI chat or AI voice experience

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Skills:

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• Deep expertise in JavaScript, Python, or both.
• Proven experience as a product engineer who understands user research, product management, and product design.

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Passion:

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• Proven experience and dedication in the civic engagement or govtech space.
• Ability to quickly shift between high-level strategy and low level code.
• Lots of grit.

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It would be a big plus if you had:

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• Experience building an civic engagement product from zero to one.
• Familiarity with GovTech technologies, trends, and best practices.

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We both share values

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• Build Technology for Humans: You believe in the immense power of AI, and want to channel it into technology that helps humans.
• Create Purposeful Efficiency: You want to make government better by helping public officials happier, more efficient, and more responsive to their communities.
• Invest in our collective success: You get your hands dirty; you will never say, “That’s not my job,” “That’s not my problem to solve,” or “I don’t care.”
• 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.

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Compensation

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This is a full-time position that includes a salary and equity, depending on your experience. The annual salary range is $100,000 - $150,000 and founding team equity appropriate for a pre-seed stage company.

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Interested?

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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! Email a cover letter and resume to hello@civicreach.ai