Location: Washington, D.C. (in-person) or remote
Deadline: Apply here by June 15, 2026
Reward: $5,000 for any referral that results in a hire
About IFP
The Institute for Progress (IFP) is a non-partisan think tank focused on innovation policy. Our organization works to accelerate and shape the direction of scientific, technological, and industrial progress. IFP works with policymakers across the political spectrum in Washington, D.C. to make it easier to build the future in the United States. You can read more about our vision and mission in our founding essay written by co-founders Alec Stapp and Caleb Watney.
The Role
We’re looking for a software engineer to increase our team’s leverage in pursuing the IFP mission: reform US policy to drive breakthrough discoveries, attract top talent, and expand our nation’s capacity to build.
Many tasks done at think tanks have historically looked like translating natural language from one form to another: translating results from the academic literature into forms that are intuitive to policymakers, summarizing public comments on new regulations, turning policy objectives into bill text, and recording structured data about contacts from meeting notes. Much of this work is necessary, but is often laborious.
We’ve already started building a programmable layer of abstraction over the top of the policy world, to move the focus of our team away from time-consuming but basic text-to-text translation tasks, and towards strategy, deep research, and policymaker engagement. Through this process, we think we’ll eventually be able to operate with the effective capacity of a think tank 10 times our size.
In this role, you’ll be building tools that the whole IFP team (35 people and growing) will use. We measure our efficacy by our counterfactual policy impact: whether we drive policy outcomes that would not have otherwise happened. Your job will be to deploy tools that dramatically accelerate this process.
Your projects will include:
- Building a policy development environment — a one-line install for our policy researchers to set them up with a local environment that can automate routine tasks and amplify their work.
- Building infrastructure and tools for personalization at scale — taking our policy ideas and rapidly distributing them to a wide range of different audiences without compromising on fidelity.
- Standing up self-service software infrastructure that allows our policy teams to rapidly design, build, and deploy maintainable and performant custom products (microsites, data visualizations, bespoke web apps) with minimal technical background.
- Identifying other areas where custom software and automations can have an outsized impact on our work.
A crucial part of this work is identifying which parts of policy research and advocacy can be effectively automated with frontier models without compromising on quality, and constantly re-tooling to adapt to the new state-of-the-art. The ideal candidate is someone who can work effectively with our policy teams to understand their goals and constraints to build the right tools, combining the sensibility of a product manager with the skills of a full-stack engineer.
You’ll report to Tim Fist, our Director of Emerging Technology, and Olivia Jimenez, our Communications Manager.
Qualifications
- You’re technically proficient in modern frontend and backend development.
- You’ve led the design and delivery of complex user-facing products across the full stack, including products that make use of LLMs and agent scaffolds.
- You know how to ship quickly while building maintainable tech, and understand the tradeoffs inherent in design choices.
- You care about building tools that people love to use, and working closely with users to rapidly iterate on your products.
This role is open to both remote work and people able to work out of our office in Washington, DC, with the latter being preferred.
Salary and Benefits
IFP offers a competitive compensation package determined by a variety of factors when formulating an offer, including but not limited to: roles and responsibilities, work experience, education/training, skills, and expertise. The salary range for this role is $165,000 to $245,000.
Our benefits package for full-time employees includes:
- Unlimited PTO + paid holidays
- Generous health, dental, and vision coverage for you and dependents
- 3 months of fully paid parental leave
- A 5% annual employer retirement contribution
Applying
IFP will pay a $5,000 reward for any referral that results in a hire. Applications will close on June 15, 2026.
