Overview

CIP is doubling down on expanding our technical toolkit for complex decision-making about the future. You’ll be leading the team building out our prototyping roadmap: we’re working on LLM-enabled future scenario generation, open-source collective constitutional AI, sandboxes for collectively-steered agents, and fine-tuning advocates for non-human entities in deliberative contexts. More on these projects and our technical approach in this blog post. 

We ship our experiments to real-world contexts, and get to actually shape transformative tech in the public interest. And we have a great time. Join CIP!

The organization

The Collective Intelligence Project (CIP) is an R&D lab whose mission is to enable democratic input into transformative technologies like AI. CIP is piloting new processes with exceptional partners across industry, government and civil society. We’ve worked on public infrastructure for AI with Taiwan’s Digital Ministry and the UK AI Safety Institute, and have run some of the world’s first democratic input processes into AI with AI labs like Anthropic and OpenAI.

Apply here!

Your job

We are seeking an exceptional, entrepreneurial founding engineer to make our pilots come to life. 

  • The impact: CIP steers the trajectory of transformative technologies like AI by example; the technology you build is what makes this happen.
  • The people: What you build will demonstrate what’s possible to key stakeholders (e.g. AI labs, governments, etc.), especially as you’ll build it together with them. 
  • The work: You’ll get to repeatedly build 0-to-1, and more importantly be the kernel of our engineering organization. 

Here are your core responsibilities:

  • Design and write code for our pilots (initially as the primary engineer). You’d be building from the projects on our roadmap (detailed in this blog post) and shape what future direction we take (e.g. which projects we double down on).
  • Shape CIP’s technical strategy and execution, aligning it with the overall mission and goals. You won’t just be writing code, you’ll have high agency over what is built and how, and be consulted on how software fits into the org’s overall vision.
  • Test prototypes in high-impact real-world environments. We’ll be leveraging our network of partnerships with organizations across civil society, industry and government.

With that in mind, you might have these attributes:

  1. You are a cross-functional engineer: You have defined and built technology people use, and ideally, led engineering efforts/worked with other cross-functional leads. 
  • You have 4+ years of software development experience.
  • You can build and ship full-stack apps independently
  • You can act as your own product manager or designer as needed.
  1. You have experience developing with generative AI. You are interested in the trajectory of AI development, have learned how to work with generative AI, and have thought about how these tools and their development could be used for good. (Many CIP projects benefit greatly from LLM experience.)
  2. You are deeply aligned with our mission: You believe that advancing collective intelligence, especially to steer transformative technologies in the public interest, is important and interesting. 
  3. You are agentic: You are excited to work on small, collaborative teams that have flexible remits and fast feedback loops. 
  • You like to build prototypes and put them in front of people.
  • You thrive given the agency to define what you work on.
  • You like to balance what is visionary and what is pragmatic.

An important general note on what we’re looking for: We definitely don’t expect that you have to be an amazing product designer, full-stack SWE, hacker-brained prototyper, technical lead, and AI expert wrapped up into one, to be hired. What we do want is for the founding engineer to have cross-functional strengths across some subset of these skills, but there is flexibility about which subset!

ission is to enable democratic input into transformative technologies like AI. CIP is piloting new processes with exceptional partners across industry, government and civil society. We’ve worked on public infrastructure for AI with Taiwan’s Digital Ministry and the UK AI Safety Institute, and have run some of the world’s first democratic input processes into AI with AI labs like Anthropic and OpenAI.

Apply here!

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