Artificial Intelligence Engineer

Volunteer for a startup coordinating real-time humanitarian action and civic collaboration! 🌐🤝

Studio Kula connects nonprofits, civic organizations, and citizens through its flagship platform, Community, Serve Us, to coordinate real-time action on complex humanitarian challenges.

The Challenge

Humanitarian organizations across the United States routinely operate in silos, lacking real-time visibility into each other's work, which leads to fragmented service delivery, duplicated efforts, and inefficient resource allocation. At the same time, traditional media covers social crises in surface-level, polarized bursts that fail to illuminate root causes or amplify community voices.

Everyday citizens who want to make a meaningful difference are left without accessible, nonpartisan channels to contribute their skills, knowledge, or ideas, reducing civic engagement to transactional donations and leaving critical humanitarian problems unresolved.

The Solution

Through its flagship initiative, Community, Serve Us, Studio Kula addresses this systemic disconnect by providing a shared, trusted infrastructure where nonprofits, researchers, and citizens can collaborate, share intelligence, and act in real time.

Powered by proprietary immersive digital environments and virtual reality capabilities, the platform features resource-request workflows that transform passive audiences into active collaborators and a unified intelligence hub that turns complex data into actionable narratives.

By offering a customizable, licensable framework for mission-driven organizations, Studio Kula breaks down operational silos, unlocks grassroots civic potential, and builds a sustainable model for collective social impact.

Role (Volunteer, unpaid): [To add]

Role Description:

We're looking for senior engineers who can provide the

technical leadership and oversight

needed to move key features to production readiness.

You will work closely with the Founder and other technical and product contributors to:

• Evaluate existing functionality and technical approaches
• Help prioritize and define technical work
• Guide implementation of critical platform features
• Review and improve code written primarily by interns
• Identify bugs, technical debt, security or scalability concerns, and opportunities for improvement
• Establish sound development practices and standards
• Help ensure features are implemented in a maintainable and scalable way
• Mentor interns and emerging developers while allowing them to take ownership of implementation
• Step in directly when a particularly complex technical issue requires senior-level expertise

Engineers who prefer to develop the features themselves rather than oversee interns are also welcome.

What You'll Help

Build

Depending on your expertise and our current priorities, you may contribute to areas including:

• Finalizing and improving core platform features such as our Unified Intelligence Hub/Data Aggregator, Resource Request Workflow, User Engagement Features, Metrics Tool, Immersive/VR Experience
• Reviewing existing functionality and identifying technical improvements
• Troubleshooting bugs and resolving technical issues
• Improving architecture, performance, reliability, scalability, and maintainability
• Supporting development of new user journeys and platform capabilities
• Review existing architecture and recommend improvements
• Establish practical coding and development standards
• Conduct code reviews and provide constructive feedback
• Identify technical debt and prioritize remediation
• Help establish testing, documentation, deployment, and version-control practices appropriate for a growing platform
• Identify potential security, privacy, performance, and scalability concerns
• And, we welcome enthusiasts who want to help innovate new ideas and features

Mentoring & Technical Leadership

One of the most important aspects of this role is

developing the people who are already contributing to our platform.

We have created a meaningful internship program that has allowed students to get hands-on experience developing highly advanced features. We have a reputation for truly developing the professional and technical skills of the students who participate in our internships. You will:

• Help vet and interview intern candidates
• Break larger technical objectives into manageable assignments
• Help interns understand

why

something needs to be built, not simply what to code

• Review their work and provide constructive code feedback
• Meet at least once per week and provide feedback in a short 5 question form from the agency
• Help troubleshoot challenges without immediately taking over
• Establish appropriate technical guardrails
• Encourage good development practices
• Help contributors grow their technical confidence and independence
• Identify when a task requires senior-level intervention

Our goal is

not

to have senior engineers doing work that emerging developers could reasonably learn and accomplish themselves. Our goal is to create a structure where experienced engineers

multiply the effectiveness of the entire technical team.

Collaboration

You will work with:

• Founder / Executive Leadership
• Product and UX contributors
• Other engineers and developers
• Technical interns
• Content and community teams
• Other volunteers and advisors

What We're Looking For

Required

• Significant professional experience in software engineering or related technical development, including AI, ML, LLM, and emerging technologies
• Demonstrated experience designing, developing, or maintaining production software
• Strong understanding of software architecture and development practices
• Experience conducting meaningful code reviews
• Ability to identify technical risks and make practical recommendations
• Ability to mentor junior developers or engineers
• Strong communication and collaboration skills
• Ability to work independently in an evolving startup/beta environment
• Genuine interest in using technology to create positive social impact

Particularly Valuable

Experience with our stack:

• Github
• WordPress / Elementor/ BuddyBoss / PHP
• Streamlit
• Railway
• JavaScript / TypeScript
• React or other modern JavaScript frameworks
• APIs and third-party integrations
• Database architecture / Supabase
• Cloud-based custom SaaS
• Authentication and user management
• Community platforms / social networking
• AI/ML integrations
• Data aggregation
• VR / immersive technology
• Video or multimedia platforms
• Analytics and tracking
• Security and privacy
• Responsive application development

You do not need to have experience in all of these areas.

We're particularly interested in finding senior engineers whose expertise complements the skills already represented on our team.

What Makes This Opportunity Different

This isn't a traditional volunteer coding position where you'll receive a list of tickets and disappear into the codebase.

You'll have an opportunity to help determine

how an emerging platform is built

, while working directly with its Founder and a team of people who are passionate about its mission.

You can:

• Make meaningful architectural and technical contributions
• Mentor emerging developers
• Help shape the technical roadmap
• Build experience leading a technical team
• Work on technology with a social-impact purpose
• See your contributions become part of a platform used by real communities and organizations
• Potentially expand your leadership role as the organization grows

Time Commitment: Volunteer 7-9 hours per week for 3-5 months remotely 💻

If you want to make change happen, apply to volunteer with Studio Kula now!