lightcone-infrastructure/lesswrong-software.html at main · LessWrong2/lightcone-infrastructure · GitHub

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  <title>Lightcone Infrastructure: LessWrong Software</title>
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      <div>Lightcone Infrastructure</div>
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      <h1>LessWrong Software Engineer</h1>
      <p>Lightcone Infrastructure is hiring full-stack software engineers to maintain and expand the LessWrong
        website. For over a decade, LessWrong has been a place where new community members absorb the culture and
        knowledge of the community, and where established members further that knowledge through the publication of
        their ideas and discussion thereof. As much as LessWrong has accomplished to date, there is massive scope to
        grow and offer the community more.</p>
      <h2>ABOUT LIGHTCONE &amp; LESSWRONG</h2>
      <p>Lightcone Infrastructure is founded on the assumption that this might be the <a
          href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yHzDrTCum4rdNRDJJ/the-most-important-century-sequence-introduction">most
          important century</a>, that the long-term future matters just as much as the present (or more so, because
        there’s so much more of it), and that advanced Artificial Intelligence and other risks currently pose
        existential threats to human civilization. In the face of all these, our goal is to ensure the light cone is
        as good as it could be.</p>
      <p>We build infrastructure and services for the community of people who are committing themselves to overcoming
        the challenges humanity faces. Our recent projects include running a retreat for sixty researchers, building
        grantmaking software to allocate millions of dollars, publishing professional-quality books, and running an
        in-person communal office for a few dozen researchers from several different organizations. And of course, we
        develop and maintain LessWrong and the Alignment Forum.</p>
      <p><a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/about">LessWrong</a> is a community website dedicated to the <a
          href="https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/rationality">Art of Human Rationality</a>, and to the
        application of that art to real-world problems, especially the largest problems humanity faces. We are the
        central publishing destination for the community, the best location for public discussion, and the archive of
        the community’s immense corpus of knowledge. In our pursuit to figure out how the world is, we aim to have the
        best epistemics of any community–online or offline.</p>
      <h2>YOUR DAY-TO-DAY</h2>
      <p>While this role is targeting people with software engineering skills, we are actually seeking “specialized
        generalists”: engineers who have the flexibility and versatility to perform any work required for the success
        of an online forum, including “non-engineering” work. Your work will include most of the following:</p>
      <ul>
        <li>Developing front-end features</li>
        <li>Fixing bugs according to priority</li>
        <li>Improving and maintaining our backend</li>
        <li>Having product strategy opinions</li>
        <li>Designing UI in mockup tools like Figma</li>
        <li>Conducting user interviews (lots of them!)</li>
        <li>Running analytics queries and building dashboards</li>
        <li>Responding to customer support tickets</li>
        <li>Performing site moderation</li>
        <li>Writing and commenting on LessWrong (dogfooding)</li>
      </ul>
      <p>Prior experience at all of these tasks is not required. What matters is that you are willing and able to
        skill up quickly, including in unfamiliar domains.</p>
      <h2>OUR STACK</h2>
      <p>LessWrong is a React app. Technologies used include Apollo GraphQL, MongoDB, Express, esbuild, and
        typescript. For our analytics, we use Postgres, Python/Pandas, and lots of Jupyter notebooks. Given sufficient
        engineering competence, specific experience with these tools is not required.</p>
      <h2>OUR ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE</h2>
      <p>The LessWrong team operates on lean methodology and sprint-based agile principles, with a very strong
        emphasis on user interviews, analytics, quickly prototyping ideas, and a heavily collaborative atmosphere.
        We’re fans of <a href="https://hackernoon.com/the-mvp-is-dead-long-live-the-rat-233d5d16ab02">Riskiest
          Assumption
          Testing</a>. We encourage the free expression of opinions and aim to implement the best version of the
        LessWrong community’s epistemic culture: being curious, updating on evidence quickly, betting on beliefs, etc.
        We value honesty and directness, like for real, especially when expressed empathetically.</p>
      <p>Though we all aim to be generalists, team members will often have their own specialization. Everyone is
        expected to mentor others in their specialization and learn from others’ specializations.</p>
      <p>Believing that this might be the <a
          href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yHzDrTCum4rdNRDJJ/the-most-important-century-sequence-introduction">most
          important century</a>, and that the next few decades are likely crucial to the light cone, we aim to work as
        hard as possible while still remaining healthy, flourishing humans.&nbsp;</p>
      <h2>QUALIFICATIONS</h2>
      <p>Coming into this job, you will need to be able to develop software at the level of a strong graduate from a
        computer science university program. In addition, you’ll need to possess (or develop) a broad base of other
        skills, ranging from user-centric product development to UI design and forum moderation. It’s okay if you
        don’t have experience with those additional skills at the start, but you’ll need a high aptitude for
        developing them quickly.</p>
      <h2>LOCATION</h2>
      <p>The position is an in-person role at our Berkeley offices. Relocation support is available.</p>
      <h2>SALARY &amp; VISA SPONSORSHIP</h2>
      <p>Salary will be a minimum of $150k, plus healthcare, and will be increased in proportion to the
        skill/experience of each employee. We can also obtain H1B visas for this position if need be (or an equivalent
        E3 for Australian applicants).</p>
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