Software Engineer

About The Company
GoFundMe is the world's most powerful community for good, dedicated to helping people help each other. By uniting individuals and nonprofits in one place, GoFundMe makes it easy and safe for people to ask for help and support causes—for themselves and each other. Since its inception in 2010, the platform has facilitated the raising of over $40 billion, empowering millions of users worldwide to make a positive impact through charitable giving, personal causes, and community projects. The company's mission centers on fostering trust, transparency, and community engagement, leveraging innovative technology to connect people with causes that matter most to them.

About The Role
We are seeking a highly skilled and experienced Staff Software Engineer with deep expertise in graph theory, graph-based systems, and large-scale social graph infrastructure. In this pivotal role, you will serve as a technical leader responsible for designing, developing, and scaling our social graph platform. Your work will underpin core product functionalities such as trust, recommendations, user discovery, and safety systems. You will collaborate closely with Data Science, Machine Learning, Product, and Infrastructure teams to develop robust graph representations, build ingestion and transformation pipelines, and deploy graph-backed models at an enterprise scale. Your contributions will directly influence how users connect, trust, and engage with the platform, ensuring the system remains scalable, reliable, and aligned with business goals.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of industry experience, including senior, staff, or principal engineering roles.
• Proven expertise in launching and scaling graph-based applications in production environments.
• Deep understanding of graph theory, algorithms (e.g., traversal, clustering, centrality), and modern graph data structures.
• Expert-level experience with graph databases such as Neo4j, TigerGraph, JanusGraph, or DGL-backed systems.
• Strong experience in designing high-scale pipelines for ingesting and transforming social or behavioral data.
• Hands-on experience with distributed streaming frameworks like Kafka, Flink, and Spark Streaming.
• Proficiency in integrating graph-derived features into recommendation, ranking, trust, or safety models.
• Knowledge of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), graph embeddings, and graph-based ranking systems.
• Strong product intuition and the ability to articulate how graph systems impact business outcomes.
• Ability to influence architectural decisions and mentor engineering teams effectively.

Responsibilities

• Serve as the technical lead for initiatives related to social graph modeling, storage, retrieval, and computation.
• Architect and scale graph databases and query systems supporting billions of nodes and edges with low-latency performance.
• Design and implement pipelines for ingesting, cleaning, and transforming social and behavioral data into graph structures.
• Collaborate with Machine Learning teams to productionize graph-based features, including embeddings, similarity signals, and trust metrics.
• Lead development of graph-informed recommendation, trust, and safety systems, ensuring models reflect real-world connectivity patterns.
• Define and implement feature engineering strategies leveraging graph topology, such as mutual connections, influence scoring, and community detection.
• Contribute to architecture decisions related to streaming systems (Kafka, Flink, Spark Streaming) and real-time graph updates.
• Mentor engineers and promote best practices on graph design, distributed systems, feature computation, and ML integration.
• Collaborate with product teams to translate graph capabilities into features that enhance user trust, engagement, and discovery.
• Ensure the reliability, scalability, observability, and data quality of all graph-related systems.

Benefits

• Opportunity to make a meaningful impact by supporting causes that improve millions of lives annually.
• Work in an innovative environment alongside a diverse, passionate, and talented team.
• Join a collaborative culture that values teamwork, transparency, and shared success.
• Competitive salary and comprehensive healthcare benefits.
• Holistic support including financial assistance for hybrid work, family planning, parental leave, flexible time-off policies, and mental health resources.
• Access to learning, development, and recognition programs to foster professional growth.
• Contribute to diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives through employee resource groups and company programs.
• Engage in community service through GoFundMe's volunteering programs.

Equal Opportunity

GoFundMe is proud to be an equal opportunity employer that actively seeks candidates of diverse backgrounds and experiences. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, ethnicity, nationality, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, pregnancy, marital status, age, medical condition, disability, or military/veteran status. We are committed to fostering an inclusive environment where all employees can thrive.