Thorn is a non-profit focused on building technology to defend children from sexual abuse. Working at Thorn gives you the opportunity to apply your skills, expertise and passions to directly impact the lives of vulnerable and abused children. Our staff solves dynamic, quickly evolving problems with our network of partners from tech companies, NGOs, and law enforcement agencies. If you are able to bring clarity to complexity and lightness to heavy problems, you could be a great fit for our team. Without a doubt you are a passionate technical leader that adeptly navigates between the big picture, details, and team dynamics

Earlier this year, we took the stage at TED and shared our audacious goal of eliminating child sexual abuse material from the internet. A key aspect of our work is partnering with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children and building technology to optimize the broader ecosystem combating online child sexual abuse.

What You’ll Do

• Build and lead a team of engineers and data scientists to create the new CyberTipLine with NCMEC.
• Define scope of development, requirements and technical roadmap with Product, Design, Data Science, and Engineering.
• Prototype, implement, test, deploy, and maintain stable engineering solutions with the engineering team.
• Present possible technical solutions to internal and external stakeholders, clearly explaining your decisions and how they address real user needs, incorporating feedback in subsequent iterations.
• Manage and mentor people on your team fostering ownership, critical thinking, and dynamic problem solving.
• Set project goals, facilitate success, and unblock team impediments
• Provide coaching and mentorship to team by providing challenging work, regular feedback, and fostering an environment where everyone can do their best work
• Recognize exceptional talent and hire a top tier engineering team leveraging structured and inclusive hiring processes
• Facilitate technical architecture and design of centralized data platform and APIs for a global data set of child sexual abuse material (CSAM)
• Build applications and tools to help investigators better manage their complex analysis of cases
• Establish development best practices

What We’re Looking For

• You have a commitment to putting the children we serve at the center of everything you do.
• You have proficient software development knowledge, with experience building, growing, maintaining a variety of products, and a love for creating elegant applications using modern technologies.
• You have experience prototyping, implementing, testing, and deploying code to production.
• You have experience creating and leading a team to success.
• You have successfully led teams through the product delivery of large scale data platforms
• You are able to guide technical work across multiple teams and balancing the tradeoffs of reusing existing solutions vs building your own.
• You have an ability and interest in learning new technologies quickly.
• You can work with shifting requirements and collaborate with internal and external stakeholders.
• You have a passion for product engineering and an aptitude to work in a collaborative environment, can demonstrate empathy and strong advocacy for our users, while balancing the vision and constraints of engineering.
• You have mentored and developed your people with a focus on career development
• You communicate clearly, efficiently, and thoughtfully. We’re a highly-distributed team, so written communication is crucial, from Slack to pull requests to code reviews

Technologies We Use

• React / TypeScript
• Node / Express
• Python
• PostgreSQL / MemSQL / Elasticsearch / Snowflake / Hadoop
• Docker / Kubernetes
• AWS / Terraform / Packer

Thorn is a strong and flexible team because of the diverse backgrounds of our staff. This includes professional background, subject matter expertise, culture, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, language, hobbies, etc. We strongly encourage women, minorities, and people from underrepresented backgrounds to apply. Your skills are needed here.