Constructive Dialogue Institute · 3 weeks ago
Lead Full-Stack Engineer
United States
Full-time
Remote
Lead/Staff
$160K/yr - $180K/yr
8+ years expThe Constructive Dialogue Institute (CDI) is a non-partisan non-profit dedicated to equipping the next generation of Americans with the skills to communicate and collaborate across lines of difference. They are seeking a hands-on Lead Full-Stack Engineer to be their first in-house engineering hire and technical owner of their learning platform, responsible for setting technical direction, making key architecture decisions, and leading implementations.
E-LearningEducationNon Profit
Responsibilities
Within your first six months, partner with Product to improve platform reliability and reduce support load by addressing peak-usage bottlenecks and reworking enrollment, authentication, rostering, and licensing infrastructure
Own end-to-end system architecture and technical roadmap for CDI’s product suite: application, data flows, integrations, and infrastructure
Contribute hands-on to front-end and back-end code to unblock delivery, lead critical implementations, and resolve production issues
Drive and operate CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, observability/monitoring, and alerting
Establish and cultivate engineering best practices (code review, branching, documentation, security)—providing technical oversight of our agency partner and mentoring incoming junior engineers as the team scales
Partner closely with Product, Research, and Implementation to translate CDI’s evidence-based curricula into scalable, usable digital experiences
Ensure secure and privacy-conscious handling of user and institutional data; work with Product and Operations to align on compliance and data policies
Communicate technical choices and tradeoffs clearly to non-technical stakeholders
Qualification
Required
8+ years building full-stack web apps with clear ownership of production systems and architecture
2+ years of proven tech-lead experience (running a small squad, owning delivery, mentoring engineers)
Strong front-end and back-end skills (React + TypeScript preferred; Node.js, Python, or Go acceptable). History with Next.js (App Router), TailwindCSS, and Auth.js / NextAuth or similar
Production cloud experience (AWS/GCP/Azure), CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code (Terraform / Pulumi), automated deployments, and operational runbooks
Practical experience with NoSQL document stores (DynamoDB, MongoDB or similar) and relational DBs (Postgres or similar)
Experience unifying and syncing data across siloed systems (ETL/transform, deduplication, reconciliation), building user-sync pipelines (OAuth, webhooks, idempotent syncs), and working with GraphQL & REST integrations
Strong practices in authentication/authorization and RBAC, encryption, secrets management, and familiarity with privacy/compliance basics
Implemented logs/metrics/tracing, run incident response and postmortems, and reduced operational risk
Able to translate product and research requirements into pragmatic technical plans and explain tradeoffs to non-technical stakeholders
Commitment to CDI's mission and to working within a mission-driven non-profit
Preferred
Generative AI / LLM experience: prototyping and shipping LLM/RAG features with human-in-the-loop guardrails, cost/safety tradeoffs, and privacy protections
EdTech / institutional experience: LMS integrations, higher-ed customers, FERPA/data-processing knowledge, SOC2 readiness
Benefits
A Mission-Driven Culture
Remote-First
Unlimited PTO
Remote Work Support
Other Benefits
Company
Constructive Dialogue Institute
The Constructive Dialogue Institute is a non-partisan, non-profit organization that leverages behavioral science to foster openness to diverse perspectives and equip people with the mindset and skill set to engage in constructive dialogue across differences.
11-50 employees
H1B Sponsorship
Constructive Dialogue Institute has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
Represents job field similar to this job
Trends of Total Sponsorships
2023 (5)
2021 (1)
2020 (1)
Funding
Current Stage
Early StageLeadership Team
Caroline Mehl
Co-Founder & Executive Director
Kourtney Bradshaw-Clay
Director Of Partnerships
Recent News
GlobeNewswire News Room
2025-02-01
Company data provided by crunchbase