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Founding Engineer, Guide to Good (Full-Time, Remote)

About Guide to Good

Guide to Good is a US-registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit platform connecting donors with high-impact nonprofits across the world. We're building the infrastructure for a more transparent, accountable, and locally-grounded philanthropic ecosystem — powered by AI-driven discovery, real-time organization profiling, and trust-building at scale. We're a small, focused team at an early but pivotal moment, transitioning from early MVPs to a production-grade platform. You'll join as a founding engineer shaping how the platform is built and scaled.

Why this matters

Philanthropic funding is one of the most consequential resource allocation systems in the world — and it's badly broken. As other sources of development funding dry up and global crises loom, the stakes have never been higher. There are an estimated 10 million nonprofits globally, many delivering essential, lifesaving work to some of the world's most vulnerable people. Without a centralized, high-quality database of the global nonprofit landscape:

• Funders spend tens of billions of dollars annually on sourcing costs that could fund impact instead. Vast sums go unspent simply because finding the right nonprofits is slow, challenging, and complicated.

• Nonprofits’ fundraising success still too often depends on who they know, rather than on the impact they can create.

• Most nonprofits are invisible to funders. The vast majority operate on shoestring budgets, and many close down due to lack of funds, leaving vital work undone.

We're building the infrastructure to change that: to make giving cheaper, faster, more informed, and more impact-focused. The organizations doing the most important work in the world should be the easiest to find and support.

The Role

We’re looking for a fullstack engineer who has built production systems and taken them from 0 to 1. We’ve built the core of our platform and have developed three iterations of our agentic profile creation tool. You’ll pick up on a working foundation with an established tech stack and engineering practices. As our Founding Engineer, you'll be the primary owner of platform development and stability: taking early-stage systems into production and keeping our platform running as we scale. You'll have real ownership over technical direction from day one. You’ll work closely with our CTO, who will define strategic direction and will ensure that the development pipeline is clear, manageable, and prioritized. In the current phase of Guide to Good’s growth, the CTO will also contribute directly to building new features alongside you. Over time, you'll take full ownership of the platform. The infrastructure you build will connect funding to organizations doing some of the most important work in the world. This role will begin with a 2-month paid trial period at the full salary with the title of Lead Engineer. We view this as a real two-way fit check — for you to assess us as much as we assess you. Engineers who complete this trial will be offered a permanent role with the title Founding Engineer, reflecting the foundational work you’ll have done from day one.

What we're building

Our core product is an AI-powered profile creation tool with three stages:

• Document ingestion: Nonprofits upload existing materials: grant applications, theories of change, impact reports, strategic plans. Our system processes, enriches, and structures this content for LLM use.

• Conversational AI: A conversational agent which identifies gaps and inconsistencies in the extracted information and uses tailored questions to help nonprofit leaders supply missing data.

• Profile generation and search: We generate a profile and surface it in a searchable database where donors can filter by sector, geography, budget size, target population, growth stage, impact evidence standard, and other key philanthropic criteria. See samples here and here.

Major features on the roadmap include:

• LLM-powered custom search: A chat interface for donors to search across nonprofit profiles and source documents for hyper-tailored recommendations by cause area and organization type.

• Payment rails integration: Direct donations to nonprofits via Stripe Connect and local payment providers.

• Giving portfolio management: Tools for donors to allocate funds across curated portfolios of nonprofits.

What you'll do

• Own platform reliability, performance, and development velocity across frontend and backend

• Build and maintain features across our React/TypeScript frontend and FastAPI/Python backend

• Own and extend our AI agent infrastructure, including PydanticAI-based conversational flows and RAG pipelines

• Manage and improve our cloud infrastructure across Railway, Vercel, and Supabase

• Establish engineering standards: code review, testing, CI/CD, observability, and documentation

• Be a key voice in technical architecture decisions, from database design to LLM integration patterns

Our stack

• Frontend: React, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS (Vercel)

• Backend: Python (Railway)

• Data: Supabase (Postgres + Auth + Storage), MongoDB Atlas

• AI/ML: PydanticAI, RAG pipelines, LLM API integration

• Observability: in place across frontend, backend, and AI pipelines

• Development: GitHub, Linear

What we're looking for

Requirements

• 5-8 years of software engineering experience or equivalent, with strong full-stack exposure. Preference is given to candidates with strong backend experience in particular.

• Deep Python backend experience (FastAPI or equivalent, async patterns, Pydantic, PydanticAI)

• Solid React/TypeScript skills; comfortable owning the frontend when needed

• Experience maintaining production platforms, not just building greenfield projects

• Hands-on experience integrating AI/ML in production: LLM APIs, RAG pipelines, or agentic systems

• Comfort with cloud infrastructure: deployments, environment management, and observability tooling

• A remote-first teammate who can deliver results with minimal in-person support

• Genuine mission alignment — you care about the problem, not just the stack

Nice to have

• Experience with PydanticAI, Langraph or agentic AI architectures

• Background in the nonprofit, philanthropy, or international development sector

What we offer

• Founding Engineer title (following a 2-month Lead Engineer trial period) with a salary of $110,000-130,000, competitive for a nonprofit at our stage

• Real technical ownership: You'll be the primary voice shaping our architecture and the product we take to scale

• Impact that compounds: The infrastructure you build will direct resources toward nonprofits across the world, including community-led organizations historically excluded from Western funding networks

• A tight-knit, excellence-oriented, high-trust team culture: No performance theater, no sprawling org charts; just a focused group of people working together to achieve good at a global level