Full Stack Developer

About CRI

The Civilization Research Institute (CRI) is a research center focused on understanding and mitigating catastrophic and existential risk. Our mission is to create and disseminate actionable knowledge and wisdom that is essential for navigating the metacrisis, and to undertake research into viable future forms for global civilization. Our work spans technology, governance, ecological tipping points, financial systems, civilization theory, and societal sense‑making. The work requires analytical rigor, systems thinking, and cross‑disciplinary fluency. We operate in a high‑trust, low‑ego environment where clarity, integrity, and long‑term thinking are essential.

If you’d like a quick overview of our work, this video with our Executive Director, Daniel Schmachtenberger, is a good place to start.

About the Role

The Full Stack Developer will build and maintain software to support our research team. You will develop research tools, data systems, and applications to help users organize information, evaluate evidence, identify patterns, and make better-informed judgments. The role spans front-end development, back-end services, data infrastructure, and cloud operations. This is a hands-on position for a developer who is comfortable owning systems across the full technology stack and translating rapidly evolving research needs into practical, reliable software.

Location & Reporting

• This is a full-time remote role. Occasional travel to Asheville, North Carolina may be required for team meetings, planning sessions, and organizational events.
• The role will report to the CTO.

What You’ll Own

• Design, build, test, deploy, and maintain full-stack software applications.
• Develop intuitive front-end interfaces for research, knowledge management, data exploration, and collaborative sensemaking.
• Build and maintain back-end services, APIs, databases, and data-processing pipelines.
• Manage cloud infrastructure, deployment workflows, application monitoring, security, and system reliability.
• Work closely with researchers to translate complex or ambiguous requirements into usable technical solutions.
• Rapidly prototype new tools and evaluate their usefulness with internal users.
• Improve the architecture, performance, maintainability, and scalability of existing systems.
• Integrate third-party services, APIs, data sources, and artificial intelligence or machine-learning capabilities where appropriate.
• Establish and maintain sound engineering practices, including automated testing, documentation, version control, code review, and continuous integration and deployment.
• Diagnose and resolve technical issues across the application stack.
• Help shape technical strategy, product priorities, and architectural decisions.
• Communicate technical concepts, trade-offs, risks, and constraints clearly to both technical and non-technical colleagues.
• Contribute to a thoughtful, collaborative, and intellectually rigorous organizational culture.

Required Qualifications

• Strong professional experience building and maintaining production web applications.
• Advanced proficiency in Python and JavaScript/TypeScript.
• Experience with modern front-end frameworks such as React, Next.js, Vue, or a comparable framework.
• Experience designing and developing back-end services and APIs using frameworks such as FastAPI, Django, Flask, Node.js, or comparable technologies.
• Strong knowledge of relational databases, data modeling, and SQL, preferably in GCP.
• Experience with containerization and modern deployment workflows.
• Experience deploying cloud-based applications and solid understanding of cloud architecture, application security, authentication, authorization, monitoring, logging, and operational reliability.
• Experience with Git, automated testing, continuous integration, and continuous deployment.
• Ability to work independently, manage competing priorities, and take ownership of projects from initial concept through production support.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills.
• Clear written and verbal communication skills.
• Comfort working in an early-stage environment where requirements may evolve as research progresses.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building research platforms, data-intensive applications, knowledge management systems, collaborative tools, or decision-support software.
• Experience with graph databases, search systems, semantic data models, knowledge graphs, or information-retrieval systems.
• Experience developing applications that use language models, machine learning, embeddings, retrieval-augmented generation, or related artificial intelligence technologies.
• Familiarity with data-engineering tools, distributed systems, event-driven architectures, or large-scale data pipelines.
• Experience with infrastructure as code, such as Terraform.
• Familiarity with privacy-preserving system design, secure software development, and responsible data governance.
• Experience working with researchers, analysts, academics, or interdisciplinary teams.

What We Offer

• Mission‑Driven Culture – Work alongside collaborative, values‑aligned colleagues tackling some of humanity’s most complex challenges.
• Health & Wellness Support – Access to wellness resources designed to support your physical and mental well‑being.
• Professional Growth & Development – Employees receive mentorship from senior leaders and the opportunity to take on meaningful projects that support continuous learning and career advancement.
• Competitive Compensation – The starting compensation is competitive and will depend on a variety of factors that include experience, education, training, certification, and location. We do not currently cap salary ranges because we value team members growing in their roles over time.
• Flexible Benefits – Full-time employees are offered flexible benefits to support the personal health, wellness, and finances of our team members.
• On-site Headquarters Perks:
  • Community events like team dinners and hikes
  • Coffee/tea station with a variety of tinctures and powders and a fully stocked pantry full of healthy snacks
  • Organic, plant-based lunches and dinners prepared by in-house chef multiple times per week
  • Specialized healing equipment open to all employees (e.g., sauna, red light therapy, AI deep tissue massage machine)
  • Bring your dog to work