Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Application Programming Interface (API), Architectural Analysis, Architectural Services, Benchmarking, Communication Skills, Computer Programming, Data Collection, Debugging Skills, Dental Insurance, Elasticsearch, Engineering, Error Handling, Error Recovery, Government, Healthcare, Incident Response, Laravel, Microsoft .NET, MySQL, Needs Assessment, Node.js, Nonprofit, OAuth, PHP Scripting Language (PHP Hypertext Preprocessor), PostgreSQL, Product Engineering, Product Support, Production Control, Public Health, Query Optimization, Relational Databases (RDBMS), Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), Simple Queue Service (SQS), Single Sign-On (SSO), Software Engineering, Systems Reliability, Technical Leadership, User Interface/Experience (UI/UX), Vision Plan, Volunteer Experience
ABOUT BETTER IMPACT
Our mission is simple: better volunteerism, stronger communities. Better Impact provides software that helps nonprofits, government agencies, healthcare organizations, and companies recruit, schedule, communicate with, and track volunteers and their impact.We advance volunteerism by equipping the professionals who make it happen with the technology, benchmarks, and community they need to run effective volunteer programs.
Today, our products support more than 85,000 organizations, millions of volunteers, and over 600 million volunteer hours across the nonprofit, public, healthcare, and corporate sectors. Our vision is a world where volunteerism is recognized, resourced, and respected in every community.
We are a growing, private-equity-backed business, and we focus on work that matters.
ABOUT THE ROLE
We're looking for a senior full stack engineer with strong architectural sensibilities to take ownership of our global platform services. These are the foundational systems that sit beneath every product we build: single sign-on, control plane, and data plane services including the aggregation layer and data hub infrastructure.
Much of this work lives with our CTO today. This role exists to take it over, so the platform layer has a dedicated owner and our CTO can turn his focus to new product. You are not joining to assist. You are here to own the layer that everything else depends on.
This is a high-leverage role. The services you own are consumed by every product in our portfolio, so your decisions have outsized impact on reliability, developer experience, and our ability to scale.
WHAT YOU'LL DO
- Own core platform services: Design, build, and maintain SSO and auth services, profile services, and data aggregation layers that serve as the backbone for all products
- Build across the stack: Write backend APIs and services, then build the frontend interfaces that consume them
- Drive architectural decisions: Evaluate trade-offs, document decisions, and guide the evolution of our service architecture
- Build for scale and reliability: Design systems that handle growth gracefully with appropriate observability, error handling, and recovery patterns
- Build for a multi-region footprint: Make sound decisions about data residency and data movement across the US, Canada, the UK, and Australia
- Ship production code: This isn't a whiteboard-only role. You'll write code daily and own features end to end
- Collaborate across teams: Work with product engineers who consume your services to understand their needs and provide clean, well-documented APIs
Requirements
- 7+ years of professional software engineering experience
- Strong full stack capabilities. You're comfortable owning features from database to UI
- Production experience with Node.js/TypeScript
- Modern React development (hooks, state management, component architecture)
- Solid understanding of relational databases (PostgreSQL/MySQL) and query optimization
- Experience with OpenSearch, Elasticsearch, or similar search infrastructure
- Working knowledge of AWS fundamentals: RDS, S3, ECS, SQS, and similar managed services
- Hands-on experience building or operating identity and auth systems (OAuth, SAML, SSO federation), since you'll own SSO from day one
- Track record of owning services in production: monitoring, debugging, incident response
- Clear technical communication. You can explain complex systems to both engineers and non-engineers
Nice to Have:
- Backend experience with PHP/Laravel
- Experience with .NET
- Experience with event-driven architectures and async job processing
- Prior experience as a tech lead or staff engineer
Benefits
- Medical, dental & vision insurance (after 90 days)
- 401(k) (after 90 days)
- Unlimited vacation + 9 paid holidays
- Paid parental leave
- Competitive comp package