We want a daring yet thoughtful graphic designer to give Causes a voice and a brand. Part of our past success has been due to our seamless integration with the designs of the platforms we use. We have achieved this integration almost to a fault – our users sometimes can’t distinguish between Causes and Facebook. We now realize we are trapped in a straitjacket of design conventions. These conventions optimize for the display of information, but do not bring us closer to our goal: inspiring people to take action.

That’s where you come in. Help us break out of the straitjacket. You’ll make mocks, design experiences, establish conventions, and build a proper brand for Causes. We’ll keep our passion for details and iconography, but we’re willing to have our product assumptions challenged to their very core. Our only requirement is that your design give our users a warm fuzzy feeling for taking concrete action to change the world.

A stellar candidate:

• Obsesses over typography
• Creates tasty icons
• Knows how to let user-generated content sing
• Prototypes low and high fidelity interfaces quickly
• Communicates effectively with both technical and non-technical teammates
• Values and practices iteration in the design process
• Designs web applications, not just websites

This position is full-time. If you’re game, please send a text, HTML or PDF resume to jobs@causes.com with subject “Graphic Designer”.

Are you unspeakably awesome? Do you think constantly about efficient code design, optimizing asset delivery and efficient event handling?

It’s not easy to get on our team, but we’re looking for more exceptional engineers who will strengthen the core of our team, specifically in the areas of responsive interfaces and efficient front-end development. HTML and CSS blindfolded, JavaScript with your hands tied behind your back and DOM wrangling adventures worth writing novels about.

The ideal candidate will have:

• 4+ year college degree in computer science (or related) OR equivalent professional experience
• Significant work experience building and shipping web applications built in a Linux environment
• A solid foundation in HTML and its many forms, including semantic HTML, web standards and their benefits and drawbacks
• Advanced CSS knowledge including the ability to create complex cross-browser layouts, from scratch, without Google
• Rugged JavaScript and DOM experience, including cross-browser compatibility, knowledge of closures and limits of the language
• Experience with at least one other dynamic language (Ruby, Python, PHP, Perl, Scheme, Lisp, etc.)
• Excellent problem solving abilities and clear, opinionated design practices

Of course greatness comes in all shapes, so we keep an open mind. We encourage you to apply if you like difficult technical challenges, helping society at large and having fun with great people.

To Apply

Send a text, HTML or PDF resume to jobs@causes.com with subject “Front-End Developer Position”.

Our team maintains a tight release schedule to push out a growing set of high quality tools for "equal opportunity activism" on the web. These tools are currently used by a rapidly growing user base of over 11 million people all over the world. Keeping up with such a diverse and challenging technical environment calls for deep scripting, programming and troubleshooting skills, outstanding communication abilities and a great appreciation for excellent documentation practices.

Causes is looking for a Unix Systems Administrator with strong scripting and/or coding experience to join our Operations team.

Working within Causes’ Operations team you will be responsible for the entire site, including our production and developer IT infrastructure. You are naturally the kind of team member who enjoys learning and working with others, responds quickly to site problems, consistently provides useful performance analysis, is interested in service architecture design, is comfortable with systems/database administration, pro-actively engages in capacity planning, has fun developing awesome tools, enjoys improving systems monitoring and so much more!

Responsibilities

• UNIX system administration; configuration, troubleshooting and automation
• Responsible for all of Causes’ web services, including requirements and capacity analysis, service configuration, monitoring and troubleshooting
• Network administration, configuration and management of various types of networking equipment (very comfortable and experienced with troubleshooting the transport layer all the way down to the physical layer)
• Analyze network behavior, performance and application issues using standard open source tools

Requirements

• BA/BS in Computer Science or related field, or equivalent experience
• 3-5 years experience with UNIX systems administration
• Excellent scripting skills in bash/sh, Ruby, Perl, or Python
• Broad technical troubleshooting and performance tuning experience
• Experience in a rapidly growing or critical production service environment
• Ability to handle periodic on-call duty
• Extra points for SQL and/or MySQL experience

To Apply

Send a text, HTML or PDF resume to jobs@causes.com with subject “Systems Administrator Position”.

Are you stupendously spectacular? Do you think constantly about software architecture, logic puzzles and scaling problems?

It’s not easy to get on our team, but we’re looking for more exceptional engineers who will strengthen our core competencies. The best candidate will have experience developing software in a variety of environments and should be comfortable with Linux servers, open-source databases, elegant code and efficient algorithms.

The ideal candidate will have at least:

• 4+ year college degree in computer science (or related) OR equivalent professional experience
• Work experience developing software in a business environment, preferably with Linux/UNIX
• Database, application architecture and software systems design experience
• Experience with at least one dynamic language (Ruby, Python, JavaScript, PHP, Perl, Scheme, Lisp, etc.)
• Excellent problem solving abilities, a firm grasp on algorithms and rock-solid computer science fundamentals

Of course greatness comes in all shapes, so we keep an open mind. We encourage you to apply if you like difficult technical challenges, helping society at large and having fun with great people.

To Apply

Send a text, HTML or PDF resume to jobs@causes.com with subject “Software Engineer Position”.

Work at Causes!

We’re an engineering-focused company that is concerned with doing social good and enabling others to do the same. Our primary goals when hiring are to maintain our engineering focus and company culture in order to built the best products we can.

The Team

Our team of engineers has a strong technical background and varying levels of business experience. We have Master’s and Bachelor’s graduates from schools including Stanford, UC Berkeley and UC San Diego. We’re a  young and energetic team with specific interest in accomplishing the social mission of the company.

The Office

Our headquarters are located in  Berkeley, California, 2 blocks from the Downtown Berkeley BART station. We’re right in the middle of a cornucopia of amazing food, culture and people.

The Company

Causes is a socially-minded technology startup focused on building online tools that enable “equal opportunity activism.” We’re trying to level the playing field by empowering individuals to change the world. Existing nonprofits must raise hundreds of millions of dollars and leverage massive direct marketing campaigns to attract members. We’re democratizing activism by empowering individuals with an arsenal of tools for all people who want to leverage their network of friends to effect positive change.

The company is co-founded by  Sean Parker – founder of Napster, Plaxo and Facebook; managing partner at The Founders Fund – and Joe Green – John Kerry campaign organizer and essembly founder. We’re well-funded by investors including The Founders Fund and top foundations. In 18 months we’ve grown our platform to over 16 million users and  raised over $2.5 million for nonprofits across the continent.

Use our code…

Over the course of building our applications we have abstracted out some common solutions to problems that others might find interesting. We have released some of that software as open-source and actively maintain and solicit feedback.

curl-multi – Ruby bindings to the libcurl’s “multi” interface
beanstalkd – fast, distributed, in-memory workqueue service
beanstalk-client-ruby – Ruby client library for beanstalkd
async-observer – Rails plugin providing deep integration with beanstalk

What is this place?

Welcome to code.causes.com. This site is our doorway to the world. We are a small, talented and growing engineering team in Berkeley, California working to change the face of activism and philanthropy for nonprofits, political organizations and the people who care about them.

Feel free to look around at our blog, positions we’re hiring for and software we publish.

–The Causes Team