Senior Software Engineer

Senior Software Engineer

• Location: Fully remote, with a location in time zones between UTC -4 and +1 preferred
• Reports to: Director of Engineering
• Start date: January 1, 2027 (potentially sooner)
• Salary range: *compensation dependent upon location and experience
  

About the role

At Meedan, we're looking for a Senior Software Engineer to help us continue building Suwali (www.suwali.io), a platform that makes organizations' knowledge and content accessible through messaging and conversational tools. This is a fully remote, full-stack role.

You'll often start with a broader goal or a problem that still needs shaping. Working with our teams, you'll help understand the need, propose an approach, and carry the work through to production. Ownership also means following up: understanding how people use what you've built and whether it helped solve the problem.

We're looking for someone who combines solid engineering experience with curiosity, initiative, and good judgment, and who enjoys contributing to decisions about what we build and why, product thinking.

What you'll do

• Work with technical and non-technical colleagues to understand user and partner needs, drawing on the context and feedback they bring.
• Turn broader goals into a practical plan, helping define scope, identify tradeoffs, and break work into manageable steps.
• Build and improve features across the stack, with particular attention to clear, usable, and polished user experiences.
• Own work from exploration and implementation through testing, deployment, and follow-up.
• Use feedback and available data to assess whether a change is useful and identify what needs adjusting.
• Keep teammates informed about progress, decisions, and blockers through clear communication and async updates.
• As the role develops, you may also manage other engineers, supporting their growth and helping coordinate the team's work.

What we're looking for

• Ownership and initiative. You notice what needs attention, propose next steps, and follow through. You're resourceful when you hit a blocker and know when to ask for help or involve others.
• Product judgment. You want to understand the problem behind a request. You can weigh different approaches, explain your choices, and balance user needs, effort, and technical quality.
• Pragmatism and pace. You're comfortable moving quickly, keeping scope focused, and building MVPs to test ideas. You look for the simplest solution that meets the goal, avoid over-engineering, and improve things based on what you learn after shipping.
• Comfort with ambiguity. You can make progress when a goal is clear but the details are still open. You ask useful questions, make assumptions explicit, and adapt as you learn.
• Clear communication. You communicate effectively in written and spoken English and help a remote team stay aligned. You can explain decisions and tradeoffs clearly to colleagues with different backgrounds.
• Thoughtful collaboration. You listen, give and receive constructive feedback, and respectfully challenge assumptions when you see a better way to achieve the goal. You take responsibility for your work while staying open to other perspectives.
• Curiosity and willingness to learn. You're comfortable exploring unfamiliar parts of the product and stack. You're open to using AI tools in your work, evaluate their output carefully, and take responsibility for what you ship.

Technical basics

Our main stack is Ruby on Rails, Python, and React with Vite. Professional experience building and maintaining production applications with Rails and React is preferable; Python experience is a plus.

You should be comfortable working across frontend and backend, with a good eye for usability and the ability to deliver well-tested, maintainable code.

Beyond the core stack, you'll have opportunities to build LLM-powered conversational experiences, work with knowledge graphs and retrieval in Neo4j, and develop messaging integrations for WhatsApp, SMS, and Signal. PostgreSQL, Redis, and AWS are also part of our stack. Experience with these technologies is welcome, but not required.

How we'll work together

You'll report to the Director of Engineering and work closely with product and engineering colleagues to agree on goals and priorities, then help shape the scope and approach. You'll have support from the team, alongside the responsibility to move your work forward and bring decisions or uncertainties into the conversation early.

We value thoughtful decisions, clear communication, and follow-through. Success in this role means helping us achieve the intended outcome and learning from what happens after a change goes live.

About Meedan

Meedan is a nonprofit focused on building digital tools and community-led programs that enhance the accessibility, reliability, and distribution of information — when and where people need it most. We codesign open-source tools and programs, enabling communities — especially those that have been historically underserved — to access the information they need to organize and mobilize. We also strive to make online ecosystems safer, more inclusive, and more equitable, so that existing pathways for content production and distribution can better serve the needs of all communities, regardless of their location, language, or income.

Our fully remote team is distributed across multiple time zones. Team members work a flexible schedule with primary availability between UTC -4 and +1 preferred.

Resources

At Meedan, we believe that the work we do is only as strong as the well-being of the people who make it happen. We’re committed to offering a broad range of resources that support our people's engagement, growth, and care while reflecting our culture's values.

Professional Development & Social Support (global resources):

All candidates around the world have the following resources available:

• Flexible schedule and leave policies for bereavement, major illness, parental responsibilities, pregnancy, military duties, civic responsibility, and severe weather events.
• We are also closed the week between Christmas and U.S. New Year’s Day.
• Professional development support
• Annual home office equipment stipend
• Monthly cell phone bill stipend
• Co-working office space stipend
• Mentorship program and regular learning sessions/seminars
• Generous travel support for in-person meetings and retreats
• Paid subscription to meditation apps and other mental health resources
• Complimentary access to publications like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and others
• Digital security training and support

Our Commitment to Equity and Inclusion

Meedan works with communities across the Larger World, and we want our team to bring lived experience of those contexts. We especially encourage applications from people whose perspectives are underrepresented in tech, including women, LGBTQ+ people, people of color, people with disabilities, and people from the regions and language communities we serve.

How We Use AI in Hiring

We may use AI tools to help review applications. They support our recruitment team, but every hiring decision is made by people. To learn more about how we handle your data, please refer to our privacy policy.