Software Engineer

About Cinder

Cinder builds the operating system for Trust & Safety. When a platform needs to write moderation policies, route content to reviewers, run AI agents against abuse, file NCMEC reports, or measure how their safety programs are performing — they use Cinder. Our customers are some of the largest internet platforms in the world, and the decisions made in our software directly determine what stays up, what comes down, and how users are treated.

We're a small engineering team building category-defining software. That means the work you ship goes live to enterprise customers within weeks, not quarters — and you'll hear directly from the people using what you built.

Why this role

This is a rare opportunity early in your career: you'd join a small team building infrastructure that protects some of the largest online communities in the world. The problems are real and urgent — state-sponsored disinformation, CSAM reporting, coordinated abuse campaigns. The software you build will be used daily by reviewers, investigators, and T&S leads making high-stakes decisions.

You'll ship fast, work directly with the people who use what you build, and learn from senior engineers who are deeply invested in your growth. You'll come out of this role with skills — product instinct, AI-native development, end-to-end ownership — that most engineers don't develop until much later.

What you'd actually work on

Unlike a lot of early-career roles, this one gives you real ownership from day one. Here's what's on the engineering roadmap right now and what you'd be contributing to:

• Workflows V2, our durable workflow engine built on Restate and BunJS. You'd build and ship new workflow nodes that customers wire together to automate moderation pipelines, NCMEC reporting, and enforcement actions.

• Review queue tooling — the core UI where moderators and investigators spend their day. You'd contribute to features like QA decision overrides, attribute-level labeling, forms, and skills-based routing.

• AI agents that review content against customer policies. We're actively building the framework that lets customers configure and deploy their own agents — there's a lot of greenfield work here.

• Metrics and analytics — our new Metrics V2 dashboards (built with React on the frontend, Django/GraphQL on the backend) help T&S leads understand how their programs are performing. Lots of opportunity to own features end-to-end.

• Two-way user communications — building integrations (Salesforce, Zendesk) so moderators can contact users and track conversation history without leaving Cinder.

• Reliability and polish — our customers rely on this software every day. You'd contribute to fixing bugs surfaced by oncall, tightening error handling, and improving the end-to-end experience.

You won't be boxed into one corner of the stack. Expect to write Django/Python on the backend, React/TypeScript on the frontend, and touch our workflow runtime, event pipelines, and GraphQL API. We'll pair you with senior engineers who can help you grow into deeper ownership over time.

What we're looking for

• 1-4 years building production software, with exposure to both backend and frontend work. You don't need to be an expert in our stack (Django, React, GraphQL, PostgreSQL, TypeScript) — but you should be able to move confidently in at least one of those areas and eager to learn the rest.

• Curiosity about customer problems. You get interested in why a feature matters, not just what to build. At Cinder, engineers participate in customer demos, hear feedback firsthand, and are expected to form opinions about what would make the product better. Bonus if you've already shipped something that came out of your own observation of a user pain point.

• Comfort working with meaningful data volumes. Our platform ingests a lot of content, events, and entities from customer platforms. You don't need to have designed a high-throughput system from scratch, but you should understand basic tradeoffs around query performance, pagination, and async processing — and be excited to learn more.

• AI-native workflow. This is non-negotiable at Cinder. You should be fluent with AI coding tools and able to articulate how recent developments in code generation have changed the way you work and improved your output. We use AI tooling heavily — from automated bug-fix pipelines to AI-assisted code review — and at this stage of your career, fluency with these tools is what lets you punch above your weight.

• End-to-end thinking. Even as AI code gen changes how frontend code gets written, you need to understand how the backend is designed to build something usable from start to finish. We're looking for engineers who want to own features from data model through API through UI — not specialists who only want to work on one slice.

• Clear written communication. We work closely with customer-facing teams and document decisions in writing. You should be able to write clearly in PRs, Slack, and design docs.

Nice to have

• Experience at a startup or early-stage company where you shipped fast and wore multiple hats.

• Experience with any of: Trust & Safety, content moderation, workflow/automation systems, policy engines, case management tools, or building for enterprise customers.

• Understanding of how attackers abuse platforms (social media, marketplaces, media) — this context gives you a head start on customer empathy.

• Exposure to modern cloud infrastructure (AWS, Kubernetes) and event-streaming systems (Kafka).

Location & benefits

We're based in NYC, where the largest number of Cinder teammates work, and we'd relocate the right person for this role. We believe in the value of in-person collaboration and hold at least two all-company events per year. We offer health, vision & dental benefits, a 401(k) plan with employer matching, fully paid commuter benefits, and a fully stocked office with paid lunch and dinner.