{"id":57052,"url":"https://alion.io/job/roost-software-engineer-osprey-project","title":"Software Engineer — Osprey Project","company":{"id":18919,"name":"Roost","domain":"roost.tools","url":"https://alion.io/company/roost","size_band":"11-50","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Breezy","truth_index":null},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"middle","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"remote","remote_scope":"stated_countries","remote_scope_basis":"posting_text","remote_working_hours":{"label":"US time zones","utc_offset_min":-8,"utc_offset_max":-5},"hiring_geo_confidence":"explicit","locations":[],"countries":[],"hiring_countries":["US"],"hiring_countries_total":1,"salary":{"min":160000,"max":290000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":290000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":3,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Discord","optional":false},{"name":"GitHub","optional":false},{"name":"gRPC","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"Rust","optional":false},{"name":"TypeScript","optional":false},{"name":"Apache Kafka","optional":true},{"name":"CI/CD","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-07-07T20:45:55Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-07-07","last_verified_at":"2026-10-27T23:29:10Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":112,"trust":{"level":"stale","repost_count":0,"flags":["stale"],"days_open":111},"description":"Note: This position is available at the Software Engineer and Senior Software Engineer level. Level will be determined in the interview process. \nPosition Overview\nRobust Open Online Safety Tools (ROOST) is seeking software engineers to join our team in building open source trust and safety tools. This role will primarily focus on the ROOST project Osprey. We are looking for a software engineer who can work with the ROOST team, users, and community contributors to collaboratively identify and design priority features and changes, and take significant responsibility in implementing that work. This is a high-ownership role; you will be the person who knows the codebase deeply, understands the user base thoroughly, and who other contributors and adopters look to for technical guidance.\nResponsibilities follow the full software lifecycle, from evolving the architecture as the project grows, designing new capabilities, reviewing community contributions, to maintaining code quality and security.\nIf you are passionate about online safety, excited about the open source mission, and able to work well across teams, this is the role for you.\nAbout the Osprey Project\nOsprey is a high-performance, real-time safety rules engine originally developed at Discord to combat spam, abuse, botting, and scripted behavior across large-scale platforms. Today it is one of ROOST’s flagship open source projects, and is actively used by organizations like Bluesky, Discord, and Matrix.org. Osprey is critical safety software; it protects hundreds of millions of users.\nThe system ingests live event streams, evaluates them against human-written rules using a structured rule language (SML), and produces verdicts and automated actions - all with the ability to track entity state over time. It includes a worker/coordinator architecture, a gRPC-based RPC layer, a web UI for investigation and querying, and a plugin system for user-defined functions (UDFs) and custom backends.\nKey Responsibilities\nParticipate in the full development lifecycle of Osprey: design, implementation, testing, documentation, and release\nImplement new features prioritized by community feedback, emerging challenges in online safety, and ROOST's roadmap\nParticipate in release milestone planning and release management\nIndependently identify and propose changes and improvements for the project, and work directly with users and community members to generate feedback and consensus\nFeature and change work may look like:Building data and event processing pipelines\nDesigning and implementing concurrency and horizontal scaling into systems\nDesigning and implementing abstractions that better accommodate the differences in user tech stacks\nImproving scaling and deployment of Osprey, such as containerizing services\nMaintaining and evolving integrations with core services, such as Apache Kafka\n\nOwn and implement best practices for Osprey’s code quality and stability, including system health checks with CI/CD, test suites, and observability\nWorking with the Technical Design Committee and ROOST team, maintain strong security practices across the project development platform (e.g. GitHub)\nReview and merge Pull Requests and triage and respond to Issues from community contributors, acting as both a technical leader and a welcoming ambassador of the project \nWrite and maintain developer documentation as needed\nEngage with the ROOST community across GitHub, Discord, and Working Group meetings\nCommunicate with the ROOST community and stakeholders with kindness, respect, and professionalism\nQualifications\nMust-have\nSolid ability in Python, and comfortable with working across multiple languages such as TypeScript and Rust\nMinimum of 3-5 years of experience in software design and development and at least 1-2 years of experience building data-intensive applications\nExhibits attention to detail in focusing on reliability, scalability, security, and continuous improvement. \nStrong user empathy and experience interacting directly with a variety of external users\nProven record of working with disparate teams and individuals, understanding issues, and making decisions and communicating them transparently. \nNice-to-have\nExperience writing clear, tested production-quality code in an open source project\nPrior contributions to multi-contributor open source projects\nExperience with horizontal and vertical scaling of systems and ensuring performance through profiling and optimization\nExperience building or maintaining high-throughput, real-time event processing systems\nExperience working on spam, abuse, or safety infrastructure, and a familiarity with a trust and safety workflow\nExperience in startups, non-profits and/or small team environments\n(Note: If you do not have prior trust and safety experience, please ensure you are comfortable working with this subject matter before applying.) \nAbout ROOST\nROOST is a community effort to build scalable and resilient safety infrastructure for the AI era. Many organizations - big and small - still lack access to basic safety resources, hindering innovation and putting users at risk.\nROOST develops, maintains, and distributes open source building blocks to safeguard global users and communities. Backed by dedicated technical teams and leading experts, ROOST meets organizations where they are and provides hands-on support at every stage of their safety journey. You can learn more about the ROOST launch and our partners’ support at roost.tools.\nCompensation and Structure\nThis is a full time position reporting to the Chief Operating Officer, and collaborating closely with ROOST’s Head of Product.\nROOST is a remote organization with global hiring flexibility; this role will be expected to work a portion of hours overlapping with North American time zones. \nROOST aims to offer competitive compensation based on candidates’ experience and their regional market. In the US, the compensation range is $160,000 - 290,000 USD. This role may be eligible for a performance-based bonus.\nComprehensive Benefits Package:Premium health, dental, and vision coverage for employee and dependents\n401(k) with matching\nPTO\nRemote-first work environment with flexible hours\n\nIndividuals based in the US will be employed by Global Impact on behalf of ROOST.\nWhat You'll Experience at ROOST\nAs part of our early-stage team, you’ll have a pivotal role shaping how ROOST evolves during its initial growth phase\nA community that genuinely values different perspectives and approaches\nThe chance to work across organizational boundaries with partners who share our mission\nThe opportunity to build technology that makes a meaningful difference in online safety and helps protect vulnerable communities online\nThe chance to define best practices in an emerging field and contribute to safer digital spaces globally\nRegular opportunities to engage with industry and civic leaders and working on Trust & Safety challenges\nFlexible work arrangements that prioritize results and impact over traditional office structures\nHow to Join Us\nPlease share upload resume along with a cover letter sharing why ROOST's mission resonates with you and how your experience could help us advance it.\nDue to the volume of spam applications, we strongly recommend applicants include their LinkedIn, GitHub, or other referenceable profile in their cover letter or resume.\nROOST is committed to building a team that reflects the diversity of communities we aim to serve. We especially encourage applications from people whose perspectives are traditionally underrepresented in technology.","description_format":"text","description_chars":7587,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":3,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Flexible schedule"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Nonprofits & Foundations"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-07-07T20:45:55Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":3,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.119,"p_room":0.28,"age_days":111,"expected_fill_days":7,"reasons":["conf:1","win:tail","crowd:"],"computed_at":"2026-10-27T05:46:45Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":290000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/roost-software-engineer-osprey-project","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/roost-software-engineer-osprey-project.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-28T03:08:05Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":4194,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-29T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":18919},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=18919"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Froost-software-engineer-osprey-project"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Froost-software-engineer-osprey-project"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Froost-software-engineer-osprey-project"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/roost-software-engineer-osprey-project\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Froost-software-engineer-osprey-project"}]}