Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. GiveDirectly is a mission-driven organization that delivers cash directly to people living in poverty. The Senior Software Engineer will build and scale reliable systems for donor platforms, payment delivery, and crisis response, while owning development from architecture through deployment and monitoring. The role also involves improving engineering workflows, resolving production issues, and collaborating with product, operations, and data teams.

Responsibilities

• 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

Skills

• Language Requirement: English
• 4+ years of industry experience creating production-caliber software and systems
• 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
• 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)
• Bonus: Experience using Python and AWS in a production environment
• Bonus: experience with payments/financial software and/or experience with microservice/serverless architecture

Benefits

• 15% bonus at target performance for United States employees, with potential for upside
• Annual benefits stipend of $21,393 for United States employees; the benefits stipend may be used to cover benefits or taken as additional taxable income
• 15% bonus at target performance for United Kingdom employees, with potential for upside
• Annual benefits stipend of £2,760 for United Kingdom employees; the benefits stipend may be used to cover benefits or taken as additional taxable income
• 15% bonus at target performance for Kenya employees, with potential for upside
• Annual benefits stipend of $8,453 for Kenya employees; the benefits stipend may be used to cover benefits or taken as additional taxable income
• A positive and supportive team with opportunities for advancement
• A demonstrated commitment to helping all staff develop and grow
• A robust health benefits plan (exact details will vary by country)
• Unlimited PTO (that we encourage staff to take!)
• Desk allowance and flexible work location
• This role is fully remote

Company Overview