Job Title: Senior Engineer, Digital Products

Employee Type: Temporary-to-Hire, Full-Time (initial term ASAP – February 2027, with the possibility to convert to a permanent role based on performance and organizational funding)

Reports To: Sr. Director of Product

FLSA Status: Exempt

Work State Location: Remote

Department: Products

Entity: NDWA

Hours per Week: 40

Salary: $130-140k

Work Location: Remote

Start Date: ASAP

Background

The National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA) is the leading national voice for dignity, respect, and recognition for domestic workers in the United States. NDWA was founded in 2007 by organizers and worker leaders in six cities representing nannies, house cleaners, and care workers, and now represents an alliance of more than 76 organizations across 22 states and 395,000 domestic workers nationally.

We envision a society where domestic work is valued as essential to our collective well-being, domestic workers are leaders in shaping the care sector, and domestic work jobs are good, economically secure jobs.

NDWA's Membership Center is the digital home for domestic workers across the country—where members learn about their rights, access benefits and resources, and connect to one another and the broader movement. Ask Aya is our AI-powered assistant embedded in that experience: a multilingual, culturally attuned tool that helps workers get reliable answers on pay, contracts, legal entitlements, and how to advocate for themselves at work.

POSITION SUMMARY

The Senior Engineer, Membership Center & Ask Aya is the primary engineer on Ask Aya and a core engineer on the Membership Center platform that houses it. Ask Aya is a digital AI tool built for domestic workers with exciting early Beta results and 2,000 current users. You will lead iterations, feature development, and integrations that make Ask Aya more useful, safer, and more measurable in its impact on domestic workers' lives—working in close partnership with product, design, data, and organizing teams.

This role is a temporary role running from July 20, 2026 through February 2027, with the possibility to convert to a regular at-will position based on performance, funding, and organizational needs. The initial term is scoped so that the right person can land, ship meaningful improvements to Ask Aya, and establish the analytical foundation described below.

This is a senior hands-on role for an engineer who is deeply fluent in modern AI/LLM application development and who writes production code every day. Working alongside the Senior Director of Product and a contracted Senior Engineer who developed the current architecture, integrations, etc. You will own the architecture and delivery of LLM-powered features—prompt design, retrieval, evaluation, safety, analytics pipelines, and the integrations that connect Ask Aya to the rest of our stack (Membership Center, CRM, SMS, web). You will also lead development on features and integrations that can aid in distribution of Ask Aya. You will also shape how we learn from Ask Aya over time: designing privacy-preserving analytical pipelines that turn worker conversations into structured insight about knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors—without compromising trust.

The ideal candidate combines strong engineering fundamentals with real fluency in AI-assisted development: someone who uses Claude Code and similar tools as a daily force multiplier, who has shipped LLM features to production, and who cares about building technology with and for low-income workers, immigrants, and movement organizations.

NDWA is working on the frontlines of AI development for good with many key nonprofit and Frontier organizations. This role is an exciting opportunity for an engineer who has frontend and backend experience, experimentation chops, and a massive interest in AI development, evaluation, and is ready to be a nonprofit champion for using AI to expand impact.

PRIMARY ROLES & RESPONSIBILITIES

Ask Aya — Primary Engineering Ownership

• Serve as the primary engineer on Ask Aya, leading iterations, feature development, and integrations.

• Own the full LLM application stack: prompt design and versioning, offline evaluation suite, retrieval (RAG) over NDWA's knowledge base, tool/function calling, multi-turn conversation state, content moderation, and fallbacks.

• Ship features that measurably improve Ask Aya's helpfulness for domestic workers—e.g., drafting messages to employers, explaining legal entitlements, surfacing benefits eligibility, and connecting workers to local NDWA chapters and campaigns.

• Build and maintain a rigorous evaluation harness: regression tests on prompts, eval sets grounded in real worker needs, working with product team on red-teaming for safety, and bilingual (English/Spanish at minimum) quality checks learning implementation.

• Continuously improve latency, cost, and reliability of the Ask Aya runtime as well as guardrails and product features that drive engagement.

Membership Center Platform

• Contribute as a senior engineer on the broader Membership Center platform—the web/app experience where domestic workers sign up, access resources, and engage with NDWA.

• Build and maintain integrations between Membership Center, Ask Aya, and NDWA's organizing stack (EveryAction Email & CRM, SMS platforms: Mobile Commons, webpage, data warehouse, and Mobilize integration).

• Ensure authentication, accessibility, internationalization (especially Spanish), and mobile-first performance for users with limited bandwidth and older devices.

AI-Assisted Engineering Practice

• Use AI coding tools as a core part of your daily workflow—for scaffolding, refactoring, test generation, etc.

• Establish patterns, prompts, and guardrails so the rest of the team can safely and productively use AI tools in their own work.

• Stay current on the rapidly evolving AI/LLM landscape and translate relevant advances into pragmatic improvements in our stack and in our product infrastructure.

Collaboration, Craft & Culture

• Work closely with product managers, designers, data, organizers, and policy staff to turn worker needs into shippable features.

• Write clear technical specs, RFCs, and runbooks; review code with care; mentor more junior engineers and oversee contractors.

• Be a thoughtful voice on privacy, safety, and ethics—particularly as they affect immigrant workers and workers in vulnerable labor arrangements.

QUALIFICATIONS

Required

• Senior-level engineering experience — 7+ years building and shipping production web/product software, with meaningful time owning systems end-to-end.

• Hands-on LLM application experience — has designed, built, and shipped LLM-powered features in production (not just prototypes). Comfortable with prompt engineering, RAG, tool/function calling, evaluation, and handling non-determinism in real systems.

• Deep understanding of AI fundamentals — can reason about model selection, context windows, cost/latency tradeoffs, hallucination and safety failure modes, structured output, and eval design.

• Fluent use of AI coding tools — uses Claude Code or equivalent daily; can describe concrete ways AI tools have changed how they ship, and can coach others to do the same.

• Strong full-stack fundamentals — TypeScript/JavaScript, Node.js, React/Next.js, REST/GraphQL, SQL.

• Data layer experience — Prisma (or comparable ORM), PostgreSQL, schema design, migrations.

• Cloud & infrastructure — AWS (Lambda, S3, RDS, ECS/Fargate or similar), CI/CD, observability, and basic infrastructure-as-code.

• Data pipelines & scheduled jobs — has built ETL or analysis pipelines (cron/EventBridge/Step Functions/Airflow-class tools), with proper retry, idempotency, and monitoring.

• LLM analytics & structured extraction — experience using LLMs to analyze unstructured content (e.g., conversations, documents) and produce durable structured outputs—topics, signals, flags, intent—that become a permanent analytical layer downstream systems can rely on.

• Framework-driven conversation analysis — comfortable designing LLM-graded prompts against a research framework (e.g., KAB—Knowledge, Attitudes, Behaviors) to evaluate conversations for things like whether a user received relevant information, showed shifts in confidence, or surfaced intent signals such as asking for help drafting a message to an employer.

• Privacy-preserving data architecture — can design end-to-end pipelines that run LLM analysis within our own infrastructure under a ZDR (Zero Data Retention) agreement, write structured outputs back to a Prisma/AWS setup, and delete source content on a defined retention schedule.

• Privacy & security mindset — experience handling sensitive user data, working within retention and -style constraints, and designing systems that minimize collection.

• Clear written communication — can write specs, decision docs, and runbooks that other humans actually use.

Strongly Preferred

• Experience with the Anthropic/Claude API — including streaming, tool use, prompt caching, and working under a ZDR agreement.

• Evaluation & analytics for LLM systems — has built eval harnesses, offline grading pipelines, or LLM-as-judge systems for quality and safety.

• Spanish language skills — either conversational Spanish or experience and comfortability building bilingual (EN/ES) product experiences.

• Mission experience — prior work in civic tech, campaigns, worker or immigrant advocacy, public benefits, or other movement/organizing contexts; or experience building technology for and with low-income communities.

• Integrations with organizing stacks — EveryAction, Mobilize, SMS platforms (broadcast and P2P), or similar.

• Accessibility & internationalization — shipped products that meet WCAG and work well on low-end mobile devices and slow networks.

What Success Looks Like in the Initial Term (June – December 2026)

• Ask Aya measurably improves on helpfulness, engagement, accuracy, and safety, with a durable evaluation system behind every change.

• Online and Offline evaluations are dependable for Ask Aya.

• Engineering requirements tied to distribution and reengagement and adoption hypothesis are scoped out through December.

• Sprint planning accurately reflects the needs of the product team goals and key internal stakeholders with 2027 scoped out.

• Membership Center and Ask Aya’s immediate backlog is cleared of all required improvements for scalability and durability.

• The Senior Engineer has full grasp of the entire Ask Aya and Membership Center build and requirements and can make architectural and technical recommendations for future enhancements based on NDWA’s goals.

OUR COMMITMENT

NDWA is a multi-racial, multi-lingual organization building a powerful movement rooted in the human rights, dignity, and equality of domestic workers, care workers, immigrant women, and women of color. We strongly encourage applications from people with lived experience in the communities we serve, and from candidates whose backgrounds are underrepresented in tech.

HOW TO APPLY

Please apply directly to the job posting by submitting your resume along with brief answers (we value clarity over length) to the following four questions:

1. Tell us about LLM/AI work you're proud of. This can be a shipped product, an internal tool, an evaluation system, a prototype that taught you something important, or a serious side project — form factor matters less to us than depth. What was technically hard? What surprised you? What would you do differently now?

2. Walk us through how you currently use AI coding tools, with a concrete recent example. What did you do in the last week or two that AI tools made meaningfully different (faster, better, possible at all)? What's a habit or pattern you've developed that isn't obvious to someone newer to these tools?

3. Ask Aya serves domestic workers, many of whom are immigrants in precarious labor and legal situations. Name one technical or product consideration you'd want to design for from day one, and why. We're not looking for the "right" answer — we want to see how you think about building for users in this context.

4. How do you approach evaluating an LLM feature or chatbot for quality and safety? Where do you start, and what would you want in place before you considered something ready for real users? Feel free to ground this in a specific example if it helps.

5. Optional: links to code, live product you worked on (with explanation of your involvement), writeups, blog posts, or other work you'd like to share are welcome, but not required.

NDWA provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.

This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation and training.

NDWA is a union employer; this position is a senior management position.

NDWA participates in the E-Verify program and is an Equal Opportunity Employer.