At Aselo, you can build world-class technology to serve one of the most noble causes there is: helping children in crisis. Aselo is an open source contact center platform for crisis helplines around the world. Less than three years old, it is used every day by helpline counselors in six countries to bring life-saving support to people in crisis. As the platform grows, it is time to bolster our team’s expertise in scalable, resilient backend systems. The promise of better data, kept secure and private yet available for use in worldwide advocacy, will require data engineering work on ETL and data warehousing. Improved infrastructure, observability and deployment strategies will get features to helplines faster and more reliably. New features like full-text search of conversations, requiring new data stores and asynchronous workflows, will help counselors help kids. This is all possible with your strong experience in backend and infrastructure capabilities.

 

In this role you will:

• build backend elements of new user-facing features, such as resource databases or full-text search, designing APIs, data stores and workflows
• develop processes and tools for data manipulation and warehousing to allow for data-driven research and best practices for counseling and intervention, upholding high standards for privacy and security
• improve the DevOps workflows that help our small team stay productive as the number of helplines we support grows
• improve the reliability, observability and security of crisis support systems that house sensitive data

You could be a great candidate for this role if you:

• have five or more years’ experience in software engineering, DevOps, and/or SRE roles
• write well-factored, maintainable, readable code in at least one major language
• have a strong familiarity with ETL and data warehousing strategies
• have a strong familiarity with deployments, operations and security on cloud infrastructure
• have experience choosing data stores based on product requirements, and successfully bringing them to production
• have experience designing secure, comprehensible, maintainable APIs
• are happy working remotely
• thrive in an early-stage team with light processes
• can write clearly and kindly
• align with the Tech Matters values of Impact, Empathy, and Collaboration

It would be great, but not necessary, if you:

• have experience running production workflows on Amazon Web Services
• are proficient in JavaScript or TypeScript
• have experience working with telecom or VoIP technologies
• speak languages in addition to English

Our Stack

• we use React for our frontend and Node/Express as a REST API
• our code is in JavaScript and TypeScript, moving more toward TypeScript
• much of our system is built on top of Twilio’s products, especially Twilio Flex
• our backend is hosted in Amazon Web Services, where we use Lambda, ECS, Fargate, S3, RDS (PostgreSQL) and more
• we use GitHub Actions for CI/CD workflows

Our Team

• The overall Aselo team is seventeen people, including six in engineering. We are still in startup mode and every individual makes a big impact. You would report to our Director of Engineering.
• We are a remote-first, globally distributed team that spans from the US West Coast to South Africa. You can work from anywhere, though people on the West Coast can expect earlier workdays and people in Europe and Africa can expect later workdays. We have core overlap hours of 8-11am Pacific Time, which is flexible day-to-day.
• We do a lot of coordination asynchronously, so writing is important. While we seek to keep meetings to a minimum, we run short daily standups and have other meetings to develop a sense of community even while far apart physically.

$90,000 to $140,000 in Canada. See more on our compensation strategy.

 

Our users come from all kinds of communities, and so do we. We hire great people from a wide variety of backgrounds, not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because it makes our organization stronger in delivering social impact. We encourage members of traditionally underrepresented communities to apply, including people of color, LGBTQ people, and people with disabilities.

 

We know there are great candidates who might not check all of these boxes or who possess important skills we haven’t thought of. If that’s you, don’t hesitate to apply and tell us about yourself.

 

An important part of every application is a cover letter describing why this position and our mission particularly resonated with you.

 

Aselo is an early-stage and rapidly growing social enterprise with the goal of helping 100 million kids in crisis all around the world by 2025. In partnership with Child Helpline International and its over 160 helpline members in nearly 140 countries, we operate an open source, cloud-based contact center platform built to give these crisis helplines the same technology power enjoyed by big corporate call centers.

 

The need is great: these child helplines receive over 30 million calls annually yet many are only able to answer one-third of the calls they receive. 94% of their communications are still voice calls, while the vast majority of children are far more comfortable with text. During the pandemic, volumes have increased by 50% or more in many countries, increasing the urgency for upgraded technology. Aselo is now the production system for six national helplines with many more around the world in the process of adopting it. 

Tech Matters is a nonprofit organization that leverages the power of tech to support social sector innovators and advance large-scale positive social change. As tech nerds for the social sector, we identify leverage points where technology can help hundreds or thousands of social sector organizations collaborate around solving a common social or environmental problem. Aselo is our first new social enterprise to launch. We are fiscally sponsored by Benetech, Silicon Valley’s leading tech-for-good nonprofit.