Join our development team!

We at Geeks for Social Change are looking for a developer to join our team. We’re a small predominantly trans, disabled, and neurodiverse studio trying to make a fairer society using activism, technology, and research. We are an atypical tech studio. Our work is based on anarcho-feminist principles, aims to be antifascist and antiracist, decolonise the tech sector, fight state violence, and work towards liberation of trans and disabled people among other things. Our big thing is about Community Technology Partnerships, working directly with communities to co-create solutions to the challenges they’re facing. Have a look at our website to understand more about who we are and what we do.

The role

We’re looking for someone with some prior experience working as a software developer. You’d need to be a confident enough programmer to be able to start from a vague bug report or feature request, turn that into a ticket, pick up that ticket, do nearly all of the development involved in that ticket on your own, making small decisions as you go, and see your work through to deployment and release. You wouldn’t always do all the parts of that process, but you would need to be able to do any part of it, often picking up from where someone else left off. You do code review as part of your normal practice, not as a gatekeeping process but as part of working collaboratively with your team. Ideally, you’d also be comfortable helping to work out what we’re doing, taking an active role in planning.

We primarily use three different technology stacks depending on the context of what we’re doing.

• If we’re building a complex application where we want server-side features we usually reach for Ruby on Rails.
• If we’re building a client-side application that relies on existing APIs (ours or others) we use Elm.
• If all we need is a static content-rich website, we use Hugo.

We’re not constrained to just these stacks, but they are our defaults and what you’d be working with most of the time, so you’d need to already either be comfortable using Ruby on Rails to build complex applications or be able to turn designs into web pages using frontend technologies including accessible semantic HTML and CSS. As part of a small team, you’d also need to be interested in learning new technologies (those listed and others) as needed according to the current focus of work.

The offer

As a studio, our full-time week is 6 hours per day, 4 days per week (so 24 hours per week), and many of us work part-time or alongside other jobs. We all work from home and are based in the UK. For this role, we would need someone working remotely able to work at least 3 days per week (though that doesn’t mean you’d have to work a full day on all of those days if that’s not what you want) and we’re happy to work around other commitments you might have or make adjustments you might need.

The annual salary for someone working full-time (24 hours per week) in this role would be £28,000 with 24 days of holiday per year plus UK bank holidays, prorated for part-time working if applicable. We have a company pension scheme with up to 5% matching contribution from Geeks for Social Change. We plan to review and improve our benefits in the new year.

As a small studio funded by charity clients and philanthropic funding, we’re not interested in the usual capitalist growth at all costs model seen in the tech industry. We set our salaries according to the rates we charge (and vice versa) and we’re transparent about what everyone earns internally. We are continually working to dismantle and work without hierarchies and we’re in the process of working out if and how to become a worker-owned cooperative. So you’d join a team working towards more horizontal management with a high degree of autonomy and the responsibility that comes with that.

How to apply

If this sounds like an interesting opportunity for you, please send an application to [email protected] with the subject line “Developer application”. Please include a couple of paragraphs about what interests you about working at Geeks for Social Change and why you think you’d be a good fit. Don’t worry about making it perfect - we’re more interested in getting a flavour of you as a person. If you’re able to also include some links to source code in the wild that you worked on, that would be great, but we understand that not everyone has open source software they can share, and if you sound like you could be a good fit, we’ll find another way for you to show us your skills. We know that CVs encourage bias and don’t generally tell us very much about you or your skills, but if you feel like it would help you show us who you are, then we’re happy to receive one.

Please also let us know in your email if you have any access needs and we’ll do what we can to accommodate them.

Given the nature of our work we especially welcome applications from trans and non binary people, people of colour, disabled people, and other marginalised groups, especially those historically excluded from technology.

The deadline for applications is 11:00 on 16 January 2023.

If you have any questions about the role or who we are, or if you’re not sure if you’re the right fit and want to talk it through, please reach out to F ([email protected]) or Katja ([email protected]) and we’d love to chat.

please note gfsc are on winter break now until January. We will respond to any messages then, thankyou for your interest!