About New_Public

We’re a nonprofit R&D lab that’s reimagining social media. Join us in building digital public spaces that connect people, embrace pluralism, and build community.

We are researchers, engineers, designers, and community leaders. We want more healthy, flourishing spaces on the internet. We have two main strategies to achieve this: helping local communities across America create more flourishing digital spaces and developing prototypes for digital conversation with public service media organizations.

We work by partnering and co-designing with community stewards (moderators, administrators) and public institutions. We’re in this to serve, remove obstacles to power, and make life significantly better for all people, especially folks from underestimated communities. We think this work is essential for democracy.

About the role

We are seeking a Creative Technologist/Frontend Engineer to join our team! In this role, you will play a key part in building on, and refining, the user interface of our Public Spaces Incubator (PSI) platform, working closely with our Principal Software Engineer, designers, UX researchers, and engineers from partner media organizations.

Based on insights from our research, design and prototyping process, the PSI team has created and beta-tested a platform for prosocial public conversation that we and our broadcaster partners are excited about. Now it’s time to turn this into a flourishing, robust, and accessible open-source conversation product that many different types of people enjoy using. That’s where you come in. You will be crucial in bringing the user experience to life with a high-quality, responsive, performant, and accessible frontend.

Key responsibilities:

1. Implement a compelling user experience, including thoughtful, sophisticated, and well-integrated animations and microinteractions to enhance usability, user delight, and public value.
2. Drive rapid prototyping experiments to quickly test design and frontend concepts, in close collaboration with PSI’s designers, researchers, and product managers.
3. Collaborate with user experience researchers and product managers to help understand the social behavior that results from our system and identify opportunities for prosocial frontend improvements.
4. Work with developers at partner institutions to help onboard them onto our frontend codebase, review their contributions, and help them when they get stuck.
5. We are a small team, so you are likely to find yourself working on a wide variety of things related to the user experience.

About you:

1. Passionate about building digital spaces that serve the public good, create community, and help people with different social, political, and economic backgrounds understand each other and work productively together.
2. Expertise in implementing animations, microinteractions, and motion to improve the user experience and facilitate meaningful engagement—equally importantly, the ability to call upon prior experience or thoughtful hypotheses to inform which of these aspects to prioritize based on their impact on the user experience.
3. Demonstrated experience working or experimenting with AI coding agents to productively accelerate frontend development.
4. Excellent communicator who can collaborate effectively with cross-functional teams, contribute substantively to discussions about scoping, dependencies, and trade-offs, and maintain clear documentation.
5. Experience building and shipping real products and working directly with designers, researchers, and product managers within a collaborative team setting.
6. Deep knowledge of web accessibility (a11y) principles and best practices and experience building accessible interfaces.
7. Demonstrated experience working with design systems and building on designs (e.g., from Figma) into production-ready code.
8. The ability to design cleanly structured modular architectures that will stand the test of time and be easy for other engineers to work on.
9. Ideally some experience with React Native (or other modern frontend frameworks) and LLMs.
10. Ideally some experience building social products, whether it is at one of the major platforms, at a startup, or your own hobby project.
11. Comfortable learning new technologies fast—while also being driven to understand both the potential benefits and harms of new technologies, eager to be thoughtful when putting them to use, and willing to advocate for equitable outcomes from their applications.
12. Strong EQ skills, allowing you to work well with partners.
13. For applicants without a college degree, please submit relevant evidence of your technical skills.

Nice to have:

1. Experience with data visualization libraries and techniques.
2. Proficiency in French or German.

More information

1. Location: United States (fully remote)
2. Compensation: $140-160,000
3. Travel expectations: ~2 trips to Europe or Canada per year, to meet with European or Canadian partners.
4. Working hours: Flexible. Most meetings take place in core hours of 9am-3pm PST / 12-6pm EST. One weekly 7am PST / 10am EST meeting with European partners.
5. Reports to: Corey Chao, Managing Director, PSI

The Process

1. Submission: Submit your application using the “Apply here” link below.
2. First Interview: After screening all applications, we will select candidates for Round 1 interviews.
3. Second Interviews: Selected Round 1 candidates move forward to Round 2 of our interview process. Those candidates will be contacted to interview with our Principal Software Engineer and at least one other member of the Leads Team.
4. Assignment: Following Round 2, selected candidates will be asked to complete an assignment that evaluates their technical and practical skills. Candidates will receive a $250 gift-card for completing this assignment.
5. Reference Check: After reviewing assignment submissions, we will request contact information for three (3) professional references from selected candidates. If you need time to inform your references of our upcoming outreach, please let us know!
6. Offer: We will extend an offer to the candidate who best aligns with the key criteria for this role.

If you’re not sure that you’re a perfect fit for the role and don’t meet every single qualification, we still encourage you to apply! We’re primarily interested in meeting candidates who are excited about contributing to the future of healthy digital public spaces, eager to learn, and ready to contribute to a diverse and inclusive work environment. Candidates who are from communities underrepresented in tech are especially encouraged to apply.

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