Software Engineer (Full-Time)
Upsolve is an award-winning nonprofit that helps low-income families file for both bankruptcy and immigration for free using technology. To date, Upsolve has relieved over $500 million in debt for low-income families trapped in debt from medical bills, predatory loans, and layoffs and has helped hundreds of immigrant families obtain work permits. We combine the scale of tech startups with the quantifiable impact of the most effective nonprofits.
Written by Upsolve Team.
Updated August 2, 2022
Upsolve is an award-winning nonprofit that helps low-income families file for both bankruptcy and immigration for free using technology. To date, Upsolve has relieved over $500 million in debt for low-income families trapped in debt from medical bills, predatory loans, and layoffs and has helped hundreds of immigrant families obtain work permits. We combine the scale of tech startups with the quantifiable impact of the most effective nonprofits.
Upsolve is funded by Y Combinator, Eric Schmidt, and the Robin Hood Foundation. Our funders also include Jim Breyer, who led the Facebook Series A, Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures and SUN Microsystems, and Chris Sacca, an early investor in Instagram, Facebook, and Uber.
In 2020, TIME named Upsolve one of the Top 100 Inventions of the Year. In 2019, Fast Company named Upsolve World Changing Idea of the Year in Social Justice. In 2018, the New York Times gave Upsolve the Good Tech Award.
The Role
Upsolve is hiring a software engineer to help us develop top-tier online tools that make it easy for families throughout the United States to access their civil legal rights. As a software engineer, you will be responsible for building new tools that screen cases and prepare the required forms and supporting documents needed for a number of civil legal rights. For example, we are currently working on new tools to help immigrants file for Temporary Protected Status (TPS), Family Green Cards, and Work Permits. You will also be responsible for maintaining existing tools – such as our DACA and bankruptcy tools – and fixing any errors that might surface.
This is a highly entrepreneurial type role, so you will have the autonomy to make decisions on a daily basis related to product and dev-ops. Your work will range from UI accessibility, to database modeling universal contexts for discussing legal issues, to infrastructure reliability, and more. You will also be working with the full team in a highly dynamic and exciting way.
You do not need any prior experience in bankruptcy or immigration. We will teach you. If you are interested in nonprofits, startups, and advocacy, we would love to chat with you about how you can help us change the way the legal system works in the United States and world.
A Nonprofit with Netflix-level Engineering Ambitions
There are many layers to doing our work at scale, and lots of technical and product-building opportunities to learn from. Here are some things we are up to:
Exploring state machines and the actor model to build an interviewing UI framework to drive all our tools supporting self-representation in financial/legal matters. Extending from that, turning those machines into state charts and building internal tools that can help the team visualize and maintain knowledge about why questionnaires/code are the way they are. We are currently in the process of open sourcing our own framework for Charity Navigator, Code for America, and others to use.
Building a structured data approach to content writing that allows for more complex reading/rendering experiences and helps us beat billion-dollar companies in SEO, and a quadtree algorithm that lets all the pages on upsolve.org site link internally to one another in a balanced way, also known as Airbnb’s “Walk Across America” project.
Improving an internal event tracking system that will handle a high volume of events for everything from court docket entries to the component impressions on upsolve.org, weaving it into scoring data from Google Search Console in our data warehouse, and providing granular analysis around content performance so our content teams can be more effective than publicly traded competitors.
Improving authentication and security at Upsolve, from scheduled data anonymization, to SQL level access control, to column encryption in our ORM.
You Are a Good Fit If:
You have built consumer-facing applications with high levels of usage and reliability
You have a track record of helping low-income communities or a connection to our work
You have a willingness to learn fast
You ship incrementally and love to iterate
You love data, analytics, and ways to measure features you ship
You can move fluidly between frontends, backends, and Dev-Ops to ensure the greatest experience is delivered and supported
You have top 1% empathy, work ethic, and organizational skills, and you would be obsessed with building the best level of customer service tools ever provided at legal service nonprofits in the United States
How to Apply?
We’d love to talk to you. Send an email to jonathan@upsolve.org. Please include your resume and a couple of paragraphs about why you think you'd be a good fit for the role.
