Software engineer volunteer volunteer roles in Birmingham
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Actively Interviewing
This organisation is scheduling interviews as applications come in. They're ready to hire as soon as they find the right person. Don't miss your opportunity, apply now!
Are you a technically skilled problem-solver ready to contribute to transformative social impact?
Tell My Truth and Shame the Devil C.I.C. is seeking a pioneering Open-Source Platform Engineer to join our founding volunteer team. This role is central to building and maintaining the digital infrastructure that will power our survivor-led, community-owned membership ecosystem for 2026 and beyond. You will be directly shaping the systems that enable vulnerable and marginalised communities to access resources, engage safely and participate in transformative personal development.
Purpose of the role:
The Volunteer Open-Source Platform Engineer contributes to the development, maintenance and improvement of open-source software platforms that support the organisation’s mission. This role involves collaborating with developers, contributors and stakeholders to build scalable, reliable and efficient solutions while ensuring code quality, security and accessibility.
About the Role:
As our Open-Source Platform Engineer, you will design, develop, and maintain the core technology stack for our membership platform, ensuring it is secure, scalable, and aligned with open-source principles. You will work closely with the Membership Director, Technical Systems Liaison, and other team members to integrate community-facing tools, data systems, and collaborative features that support our anti-capitalist, values-led mission. This is a hands-on, impact-driven role where your technical expertise directly enables social change.
Experience Qualification and Requirements
Essential Technical Competencies:
- Experience designing, integrating and maintaining APIs, as well as managing secure authentication and data practices.
- Familiarity with cloud-hosted and on-premises system environments, including deployment and maintenance.
- Proven experience in open-source development, software engineering or systems architecture.
- Ability to clearly document technical processes, system workflows and platform architecture.
- Skilled at communicating complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders.
- Contributing to open-source projects or collaborative software development initiatives.
- Strong problem-solving and troubleshooting abilities to debug code, optimise performance and implement improvements.
Desirable / Can Be Developed:
- Basic understanding of open-source software principles and collaborative development practices.
- Familiarity with at least one programming or scripting language (e.g. Python, JavaScript, Bash or similar).
- Developing knowledge of system reliability, security best practices and performance monitoring.
- A problem-solving mindset, curiosity and enthusiasm for learning new tools and technologies.
Qualifications:
- Formal qualifications are not required but desirable.
- Practical experience through open-source contributions, personal projects, study or volunteering is valued.
- Willingness to learn and complete required induction or training.
Main Responsibilities/ Key Duties
- Develop, implement and maintain the open-source membership platform and associated tools to support community engagement and organisational objectives.
- Build scalable, secure and accessible systems that facilitate user registration, content management and interactive community features.
- Build robust content management systems (CMS) to enable efficient creation, organisation, publishing and retrieval of digital content for community members and volunteers.
- Integrate third-party tools, APIs and plug-ins to extend platform functionality in alignment with organisational goals and requirements.
- Collaborate with technical and non-technical team members to understand community and organisational needs, translating them into functional and user-friendly systems.
- Provide technical guidance and insights to inform strategic decisions around system architecture, integrations, platform design and development priorities.
- Monitor platform performance and troubleshoot issues, proactively identifying and resolving technical problems to ensure smooth operation.
- Ensure documentation supports compliance and best practices, including data protection, accessibility standards and organisational policies.
- Use documentation as a tool for continuous improvement, identifying gaps, optimising workflows and refining platform usability based on feedback.
- Document technical processes, system architecture and user guides to maintain organisational knowledge, support future development and assist team onboarding.
- Contribute to the ongoing strategy for digital systems development and platform innovation, suggesting improvements, new features and best practices for long-term sustainability.
- Facilitate knowledge transfer by providing documentation that supports onboarding of new volunteers, technical contributors and staff members.
What This Role Offers You:
- The opportunity to shape the digital foundation of a pioneering C.I.C. and directly impact survivor-led and community-driven initiatives.
- Hands-on leadership experience in open-source systems design and platform development.
- Personal growth through working in an innovative, mission-driven environment tackling real-world social challenges.
- The satisfaction of contributing to a platform that empowers marginalised communities, amplifies survivor voices and builds collective culture.
What This Role Is Not For:
- Individuals seeking traditional corporate structures, hierarchies or purely financial reward.
- Those unwilling to work within an anti-capitalist, collaborative, values-led framework.
- People expecting pre-built systems or rigid processes—this role requires creativity, problem-solving and adaptability.
Next Steps
Shortlisted applicants will be invited to
- A values-led conversation.
- If you are ready to apply your technical skills to a high-impact, community-driven initiative and help build systems that empower survivors and marginalised communities, we want to hear from you.
- Apply now and be part of creating something truly transformative.
A Final Word
Platforms enable communities to connect.
If you know that: Turn organisational needs into practical. User-friendly digital solutions support communities to connect.
The client requests no contact from agencies or media sales.
Actively Interviewing
This organisation is scheduling interviews as applications come in. They're ready to hire as soon as they find the right person. Don't miss your opportunity, apply now!
African Development Choices (ADC) is a UK-registered charity on a mission to reduce poverty by empowering communities to make more informed choices in the management of public resources.
ADC’s purpose is to enable communities to independently meet their needs for essential services, such as clean water and safe sanitation, and improve lives in Africa.
At ADC we encourage a working culture of seeking and giving input, showing and taking initiative, and commitment to the organisation and its purpose.
We now have an exciting opportunity for a volunteer Senior AI Agent Architect to join ADC and help build a live prototype of MajiGuard AI.
Main purpose of job:
To lead the technical design and hands-on development of MajiGuard AI, an agentic AI prototype that helps ADC identify underused WASH resources, structure recovery and reallocation cases, and verify that recovered value reaches facility upgrades and operations and maintenance.
Division: Technology / AI Innovation
Department: Product & Engineering
Position reports to: Head of AI Innovation
Direct reports for the position: Volunteer AI engineers, developers and technical contributors
Main Duties & Responsibilities:
- Lead the end-to-end architecture of MajiGuard AI, including the selection and integration of models, agent workflows, orchestration tools, retrieval systems, data structures and human-in-the-loop controls appropriate for a live prototype.
- Translate ADC’s operational goals into practical AI workflows, especially for identifying underused WASH resources, standardising evidence and case preparation, supporting recovery and reallocation decisions, and verifying delivery of value to facility improvements and ongoing operations and maintenance.
- Build and iterate a live prototype using pragmatic, cost-effective tooling, with strong attention to reliability, traceability, security, maintainability and ease of future scaling.
- Design structured inputs, prompts, evaluation criteria and decision logic so that outputs are useful to non-technical ADC teams working across programmes, research, partnerships and leadership.
- Establish a technical roadmap for the prototype, including architecture choices, milestone planning, testing priorities, deployment options and documentation for future funders, partners and developers.
- Work closely with ADC leadership to shape the product vision and ensure the prototype aligns with ADC’s wider governance and public service innovation model.
- Advise on suitable approaches for data governance, privacy, model risk, hallucination control, auditability and responsible AI use in the context of public-resource management and service delivery.
- Define and monitor prototype success metrics, including usefulness, accuracy, turnaround time, workflow fit, and operational learning that can strengthen grant applications, partnerships and future product development.
- Support the transition from local experimentation to a live prototype environment, including basic cloud or hosted deployment thinking, version control practices and engineering handover readiness.
- Mentor and coordinate other volunteer technical contributors where relevant, helping ADC build a small but high-quality AI capability around MajiGuard AI.
Knowledge, skills, and experience:
Essential
- 8+ years of relevant experience in AI, machine learning, applied NLP, intelligent automation, agentic systems, or modern software engineering for production-grade data or AI products
- Strong hands-on experience designing and building AI systems, including LLM-based applications, retrieval-augmented generation, agent workflows, orchestration frameworks, evaluation pipelines and API integrations
- Experience taking ideas from concept or prototype stage into a usable live product, pilot or production-like environment
- Excellent technical judgement on model selection, system design trade-offs, latency, reliability, observability and cost-conscious engineering
- Strong programming ability, ideally including Python and modern backend tooling, with the ability to work across architecture, implementation and troubleshooting
- Experience designing structured workflows where AI outputs must be reviewable, auditable and useful for operational decision-making
- Ability to simplify complex technical concepts for non-technical stakeholders and translate mission goals into practical product choices
- Interest in using AI to strengthen public service delivery, accountability, governance, resource allocation, or adjacent social impact problems
- Ability to actively take initiative and help set things up in a start-up environment
- Ability to actively seek and give input in a collaborative team environment
- A committed team player with good communication skills
- Available to volunteer at least 8-12 hours a week
Desirable
- Experience with agentic AI products involving workflow automation, task routing, multi-step reasoning, document intelligence or evidence-based case management
- Experience with cloud deployment, containerisation, CI/CD, databases, vector stores, authentication and production monitoring for AI systems
- Experience working on civic tech, govtech, development, WASH, infrastructure, audit, compliance or public-finance-related products
- Experience working in an early-stage start-up or mission-driven organisation and comfortable operating with ambiguity
- Experience mentoring engineers or leading small technical teams across different locations and time zones
What ADC Offers You
This is a volunteer, remote and unpaid position with the following benefits:
- A chance to play a foundational role in shaping MajiGuard AI from concept into a live prototype with real strategic relevance to ADC’s mission
- An opportunity to apply advanced AI and product-building skills to a meaningful public-interest challenge connected to WASH, accountability and service delivery in Africa
- An opportunity to work with a diverse global team and contribute to an organisation seeking systemic social change
- Professional learning, leadership and portfolio-building opportunities through high-ownership work
- Work reference provided
This job description is a written statement of the essential characteristics of the job, with its principal accountabilities, incorporating a note of the skills, knowledge and experience required for a satisfactory level of performance. This is not intended to be a complete, detailed account of all aspects of the duties involved.
Here at African Development Choices, we celebrate diversity, equity, and inclusion. Our teams are made up of people from all over the world and we welcome all applications. If you are disabled or have a long-term health condition, and you require any reasonable adjustments for your application with us, please let us know by contacting recruitment(at)africandevelopmentchoices(dot)org.
The client requests no contact from agencies or media sales.