I’m hiring a Member of Technical Staff at IFP. Your job will be to build software that allows us to operate with the effective capacity of a think tank 10 times our size. If you care about reforming US policy, I think this is one of the highest leverage roles available: you’ll be directly amplifying the work of our extremely cracked and growing team of 35. Given how important this job is, we will pay a $5,000 reward for any referral that results in a hire. More on the role: I expect this will be a hard role to fill, for a few reasons: 1. You have to believe US policy is the most important lever for impact There are plenty of opportunities in the private sector for engineers to have a significant impact. But technical talent in public policy is far more neglected, and often much higher leverage. IFP’s mission is to reform US policy to drive breakthrough discoveries, attract top talent, and expand our nation’s capacity to build. We measure our efficacy by our counterfactual policy impact: whether we create good policy outcomes that would not have otherwise happened. The software you build will directly affect the rate at which we can do this. The work you help us do faster and better will be read in the Oval Office, will shape the direction of billions in federal $, and will directly influence geopolitical strategy. We need someone in this role who internalizes how important this is. 2. You have to want to deeply understand what effective policy work looks like Many tasks in policy research and advocacy are time-consuming but basic text-to-text translation tasks, like simplifying results from academic papers, summarizing public comments on new regulations, and recording information about contacts from meeting notes. This work is necessary to produce good policy outcomes, but laborious. One way to understand this role is by looking at the way progress in AI capabilities has shifted the job of a programmer away from writing code and more towards specifying requirements and verifying the work of AI agents. In this role, you’ll do the same for policy work, moving the focus of our team away from basic natural language manipulation tasks and towards strategy, deep research, and policy engagement. A crucial part of this work is identifying which parts of policy research and advocacy can be effectively automated with frontier models without compromising quality, and continually retooling to adapt to the latest state of the art. The ideal candidate is someone who cares about building tools that people love to use and who can work effectively with our policy teams to understand their goals, processes, and constraints. 3. You have to be able to build a wide variety of great software Your projects will vary widely, from building agent scaffolds to custom CRM tooling to deployment pipelines for maintainable, performant microsites (check out the full job description for more). The right person will have led the design and delivery of complex user-facing products across the full stack, know how to ship quickly while building maintainable tech, and understand the trade-offs inherent in your design choices. – This role is open to both remote work and people able to work out of our office in Washington, DC, with the latter being preferred. The salary range for this role is $165,000 to $245,000. Here’s the full JD and link to apply: ifp.org/opportunity/me… Applications close May 31st.
