Job Description

The organization Raheem (raheem.org) is the independent service for reporting police violence in the United States working to end police terror against Black people. Since launching in 2019, weve helped more than 2,400 people report police and tied more than 275 officers to allegations of police misconduct.

Were a growing team of designers, data scientists, and policy experts with a shared mission, who genuinely enjoy working together while appreciating the gravity of what we are building. The organization is led by Brandon D. Anderson, a Black queer abolitionist who founded Raheem in 2017 after police killed his life partner during a routine traffic stop.

We are building extraordinary tools to confront an institutional powerhouse that has profoundly shaped the lives of Black people. Tools that make police behavior more visible, move residents to the center of policymaking, and shrink the role of the police.

This requires imagination, hard work, and courage. We are working to achieve something unprecedentedhelp us build it!

What we've built so far Raheem launched in 2019 as a website for people to report encounters with police. But rather than expect people always to come to Raheem, this year we evolved it into a chatbot (built on React/Typescript/Firebase) that can be embedded on any website so people can report police when and where they're ready.

After someone reports an incident, the chatbot helps them take a next step to get healing and justice, such as finding a free lawyer nearby, connecting to local advocacy organizations, alerting local representatives, and any service that one of the sites embedding the chatbot offers. Essentially we're building a nationwide network to report police and end police terror.

In parallel, we store the reports in Firebase where they can be shown on Raheem.org and used in policy advocacy (for example in this report for the City of Oakland).

What's next Because Raheem's reporting interface is based on a conversational model, people can report police anywhere text or voice can be used. Currently this includes Twitter DMs, Facebook messenger, and SMS, in addition to the web, but there are so many possibilities to extend and improve the service.

For example, we want to...

• Make it easier for people to report police by...
  • Allowing people to share video or audio;
  • Extending the network of sites that host the chatbot;
  • Crawling social media for organic reports of police violence, and having the chatbot offer to collect reports via DMs;
  • Translating the bot to additional languages.
• Refine the chatbot by...
  • Analyzing patterns of use (for example, what steps people select after reporting) and evolving accordingly;
  • Evolving the set of questions we ask to be most useful and impactful for policy advocacy by organizations in the network.
• Improve the bot's ability to deliver next steps to people who report by...
  • Expanding our datasets (e.g. how to make a formal complaint, find a lawyer, etc) to as many locations as possible;
  • Integrating additional services (e.g. for automatically identifying local representatives);
  • Working with organizations that embed the chatbot to better integrate their services and resources.
• Increase utility of the data by...
  • Better visualizing both individual reports and aggregate data;
  • Standardizing data formats among all organizations working in this space.
• Your ideas!

What youll be doing Raheem is at an exciting juncture and were looking for a Full-Stack Software Engineer to take our leading social and racial justice tools to the next level.

You'll work directly with Raheems Founder, its Head of Product, designers, and others to invent, implement, and improve features for our growing audience of people who have experienced police violence.

• Youll lead technical strategy for everything we do.
• Youll participate in the strategic development of methods, techniques, and evaluation criteria for projects and programs.
• You'll brainstorm with cross-functional team members to conceptualize and implement new features.
• Youll keep our production software running smoothly and work with the rest of the product team to prioritize issues and features to continually improve our products.
• Youll collaborate with other contributors (volunteers and contractors) to maintain a high standard of code quality.

What will lead to success Software engineering excellence

• Have a strong CS background you draw on to choose the right algorithms, systems approaches, and patterns to solve problems, without reinventing the wheel.

• Be able to hit the ground running. We generally look for 4+ years of full-time professional experience or the equivalent.

• Have experience building and owning full-stack applications end-to-end.

• Be comfortable leading technical architecture discussions and helping drive technical decisions.

• Be biased towards action and shipping. Once youve sketched out an idea, you find the fastest path to a prototype to prove the concept.

• Be creative: youll come up with new ideas based on your broad understanding of technological possibilities and the domain knowledge youll learn.

Solving hard problems, together.

• Come up with novel solutions, working well with technologists and non-technologists alike.
• Ask hard questions and challenge assumptions to ensure that were solving the right problems.
• Take ownership of the technical side of Raheem by proactively looking for opportunities to improve and extend the product and infrastructure.
• Contribute to a positive culture that enables us to find joy in the work of fixing painful problems.

Caring.

• Be committed to ending state-sanctioned violence against Black and Brown people, trans people, women, queer people, people with disabilities, people living without houses and all others who have the right to live and love freely.
• Engage with the problem space, taking the time to listen and learn with curiosity.

Culture and values: Raheem is a positive, diverse, and supportive culturewe look for people who are curious, inventive, and work to be a little better every single day.

• We aspire to be smart, humble, hardworking, and, above all, collaborative.
• We approach problem-solving using a Black queer feminist lens that recognizes systems of oppression and values difference and individual experience.
• We ask each other hard questions, hold each other accountable, and support each others growth.
• We use humor and warmth in order to enjoy doing the most difficult, meaningful, and impactful work of our lives.

If this sounds like a good fit for you, we cant wait to meet you!

BENEFITS

• Up to $160k / year, depending on experience and location
• Health, dental, and vision benefits
• Parental leave
• Unlimited vacation
• Remote work we're a distributed team that works from anywhere with good internet.