About BlueDot Impact

We’re a startup non-profit helping people create a better future for humanity by designing and running courses on some of the world’s most pressing problems. We find people who could have enormous impact, motivate and equip them via our courses, and connect them with impactful opportunities.

Over the past 2 years, we’ve supported 2,500 people to learn about AI safety and pandemic preparedness. Our alumni have gone on to develop Anthropic’s Responsible Scaling Policies, conduct AI evaluations at the UK Government’s AI Safety Institute, work at Google DeepMind on mechanistic interpretability, and much more. In 2024, we’ll train 3,000 more people via our three main courses (AI Alignment, AI Governance, Pandemics). In 2025, we’ll expand our course portfolio by designing courses on topics like cybersecurity for AI companies, technical AI governance, biosecurity policy, and upskilling in machine learning. We’ll also expand our workshops for government policymakers. 

We’re a small and intense team. We’re very serious about having a big impact on the world, while also enjoying a fun and silly working environment. We’re always learning new things, teaching each other new skills, and improving the way we work so we’re more effective at producing great courses that scale. We have high expectations for each other’s work, and we support each other to meet those expectations. 

The team is roughly split in two: focus area specialists who design the courses, and the product/software team who build and improve the course infrastructure. You’ll be the only full-time software engineer in the team, and you’ll work closely with Adam (AI Safety and some software), Li-Lian (Product), our new Product hire, and Dewi (Director). We’re a small team, so you’ll wear many hats. 

We’re grateful to be supported by Open Philanthropy, and we’ve raised $4M thus far. We’re now fundraising for a further $5M to support our work over the next two years. 

Learn more about other open roles and our team values on our Careers page.

What you'll do

We’re looking for a software engineer who is obsessed with building high-quality experiences for the students in our courses, and who can help us scale our infrastructure to train 10x more people over the next few years. 

Your work will have a huge impact on the pipeline of people going into AI Safety and biosecurity, by helping us scale and improve the most popular courses on those topics. Our AI safety courses are the main pathway by which people go from “interested in AI safety” to “working in AI safety.” If you’re a software engineer and want to contribute to these fields, this is a great opportunity to use your existing skills to improve the world. 

In the first 6 months, you’ll:

• Solve the infrastructure challenges that restrict our ability to deploy more courses, faster. Our course platform is not set up to deal with 5+ courses and 1,000s of users, which leads to slow load speeds, data being lost during syncs, and playing whac-a-mole with bugs. 

• Automate or prevent most customer service requests, so that the team is not spending hours every week responding to similar emails and Slack messages from students. This will involve a mix of understanding and categorising these requests, building things that prevent the requests, and creating an automated way to respond to most common requests. 
• Support alumni to land impactful jobs at partner orgs. We have 1,000s of alumni, and there are 100s of impactful job openings. You’ll build an automated matching system to identify people who could be a great fit for open positions, and you’ll build a dashboard that hiring managers can use to recruit from our alumni network. 

We use a range of platforms to design and deliver our courses. You’ll learn how to use all of these in your first few months. 

• Our custom apps are built using TypeScript and React, primarily deployed as containers on Kubernetes. Most of our code is open-source, and we contribute to open-source where we can.
• Airtable is the cornerstone of our infrastructure, hosting all our data, providing visualisations of student engagement, interfaces for creating more courses, and more. We’ve built our own best-in-class standards, libraries, and tools, and have built many custom extensions that save us days of work per course iteration.
• Other tools we use today include Make, customer.io, Bubble, Whalesync, CoAlias, Porkbun, PostHog, miniExtensions, and short.io. 

After 6 months, you’ll use your understanding of our courses and infrastructure to propose and build new systems that contribute to our priorities. These include: 

• Increasing the number of exceptional people who are excited to apply to our courses,
• Improving the learning experience on our courses, so students become more capable at having a huge impact, and
• Increasing the number of alumni who land impactful roles within 1 year of course completion.

About you

You might be a great fit for this role if you:

• Are passionate about preventing pandemics and/or an AI catastrophe.
• Aspire to build amazing user experiences, and feel excited to talk with our students and understand their challenges.
• Can diagnose complex problems, generate many ideas on how to solve them, and rapidly build prototypes to test which are most effective.
• Have 2+ years of software engineering experience, coding in TypeScript or another high-level programming language.

We encourage speculative applications; we expect many strong candidates will not meet all of the criteria listed here.

We believe that a more diverse team leads to a healthier and happier workplace culture, better decision-making, and greater long-term impact. In this spirit, we especially encourage people from underrepresented groups to apply to this role, and to join us in our mission to help solve the world’s biggest problems.

Location and compensation

We’re based in LISA in East London, and we accept applications from all countries. We can sponsor UK visas, and we will pay for all your moving costs (flights, housing in London for 1 month, air freight). We have a strong preference for individuals who can move to London, though we will consider remote-first for exceptional candidates. This is a full-time role.

Compensation is based on your experience and relevant industry benchmarks, and will likely fall within £60-90k. Other benefits include:

• An annual £5,000 wellbeing budget and a £5,000 productivity budget
• Private health, dental, and vision insurance
• 10% employer pension contribution
• 25 days of paid vacation in addition to public holidays

Apply for this role

The application process consists of:

• Stage 1: Initial application (<20 minutes).
• Stage 2: Work test (2 hours).
• Stage 3: Interview (45 mins).
• Stage 4: 1-2 day in-person work trial in London. We’ll pay for your flights and accommodation. If you can’t make it to London, we’ll consider a remote work trial. 

You will be compensated for all work samples at £30/hour.

The application deadline is 7 July. We evaluate candidates on a rolling basis and we encourage you to apply as soon as possible.

If you have any questions about the role, email dewi [at] bluedot [dot] org.