Job: Three Jobs at the Electronic Frontier Foundation

EFF fighting for your rights since before you were out of diapers

All ye digital do-gooders have just found your most exciting blog post of the week, right here, because here are three hands-on jobs for one of the most badass units at the intersection of the internet and personal rights. They’re looking for an international project coordinator, a web developer, and a finance director. None of these are coffee-fetching positions, they’re all front line work.

International Project Coordinator

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a 501(c)(3) organization fighting for digital rights worldwide, is looking for an enthusiastic and detail-oriented International Project Coordinator for our international team. EFF’s five international team members spend a lot of time on the road, juggling many projects and responding quickly to fast-moving global events. As a key part of that team, the International Project Coordinator will be based in EFF’s San Francisco office and work to track that travel, cajole those projects to completion, document our successes, and define and improve our processes. This is a new position reporting directly to EFF’s International Director.
Responsibilities include, but aren’t limited to:

• Acting as point of first contact for EFF’s non-US intake–which can range from bloggers in danger, to reporters looking for comments, to international politicians asking to visit, to volunteers eager to help.
• Coordinating our work with EFF’s many other moving parts, including acting as the San Francisco go-between when other team-members are traveling and keeping all staffers informed of new developments.
• Acting as one more pair of eyes for our written work, including fact-checking and sub-editing.
• Documenting and collating the knowledge we collect in a form that’s useful for us internally, to our many allies, and to the public, including arranging translations and printed materials.
• Working closely with our International Director to convert strategic long-term goals into practical, everyday logistics, and helping to make sure we’re on track with, and keeping track of, our achievements.
• This isn’t a policy job: You don’t need to know the fine details of global copyright policy or the location of the NSA’s secret submarine taps. A long-standing interest in our issues, and enthusiasm for working alongside committed advocates for digital rights from around the world, is a must.

To apply for this job, you’ll need to demonstrate the following:

• An ability to communicate articulately in English, both in writing and speaking;
• Experience exercising your diplomatic skills–you’ll be dealing with people from all over;
• Some past knowledge of the international space–maybe you’ve worked abroad or you studied International Relations. Fluency in a second major language would also be a huge plus;
• Superb organizational ability; and
• A BA/BS college degree, or equivalent evidence of academic rigor.

EFF offers outstanding benefits, including health, dental and vision insurance, retirement account with employer contributions, 14 paid holidays a year, 20 PTO days a year, and more. Most importantly, EFF is an amazing place to work. Everyone is dedicated not only to protecting civil liberties online, but also to creating a supportive and fun culture in which to do a tremendous amount of high profile work. If you think you’d like to be a part of our team, please send your resume, references and a cover letter with your salary requirements to careers@eff.org. This is a full-time position based in EFF’s office in San Francisco, CA. Inquiries about whether this job can be done remotely or part-time will not be answered. No phone calls please!

Web Developer / Hypertext Hacker

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a nonprofit civil liberties organization based in San Francisco, is seeking a full-time programmer to help build web applications that protect and promote civil liberties in the digital world. The Web Developer will be responsible for improving and maintaining EFF’s existing websites, creating new activism campaign sites and web projects, developing mobile apps for EFF’s new Action Center, building a new free software-based solution for delivering messages to Congress, writing code to integrate with our CiviCRM database, and making sure things scale when our campaigns go viral. We’ll also be counting on your creative ideas for future web projects.

EFF’s web projects include content-oriented sites like EFF.org, Trolling Effects and Surveillance Self-Defense; activism campaign sites like Necessary and Proportionate, the Open Wireless Movement, Defend Innovation, and Jailbreaking Is Not a Crime; our growing online database of FOIA documents; traffic-heavy petitions that fight legislation like SOPA and CISPA; cutting-edge, creative tools for Internet users to take action for digital rights you’ll develop for EFF’s new Action Center; and web-centric liberty-enhancing projects like Panopticlick, HTTPS Everywhere and the SSL Observatory. You’ll have opportunities to build new free software for the open web and contribute patches to existing software that we rely on.

Requirements:

• Passion for using web technology to fight for online free speech, innovation and privacy
• Working knowledge of the complete web application stack (application, databases and operating systems)
• Very fluent in JavaScript and at least one major server-side application language (PHP preferred but not mandatory)
• Ability to write custom web applications on demand
• Experience building mobile-first responsive websites
• Good knowledge of computer security, and especially web security
• Linux command line operations and shell scripting
• Ability to work with remote APIs and efficiently integrate them into web apps
• Working knowledge of git or similar version control software
• Appreciation of the power of good UI design and an interest in wielding it
• Strong oral communication skills and enthusiasm to support and collaborate with multiple teams around the organization
• Ability to prioritize and multitask in a workplace where many things are happening at once

Would be great:

• Comfortable enough with contemporary front-end web development (HTML5, CSS3) for building attractive user interfaces
• Experience developing mobile apps for Android and iOS
• Knowledge of Drupal and writing Drupal modules
• Knowledge of CiviCRM development
• Experience working with Salsa Labs
• Familiarity with Python
• QA/testing tools and test-driven development
• Experience with caching or CDNs

EFF offers outstanding benefits, including health, dental and vision insurance, retirement account with employer contributions, 14 paid holidays a year, 20 PTO days a year, and more.  Most importantly, EFF is an amazing place to work.  Everyone is dedicated not only to protecting civil liberties online, but also to creating a supportive and fun culture in which to do a tremendous amount of high profile work.  If you think you’d like to be a part of our team, please send a cover letter and your resume with links to some samples of your work to techjobs@eff.org. Please send these materials in a non-proprietary format.  This is a full-time position based in EFF’s office in San Francisco, CA.  Inquiries about whether this job can be done remotely or part-time will not be answered.  No phone calls please!

Finance Director

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a nonprofit civil liberties organization based in San Francisco, is seeking a hands-on Finance Director. This is a new position reporting directly to the Executive Director and supporting EFF’s growing and creative staff of lawyers, activists, technologists and others fighting to protect digital rights. The Finance Director will be responsible for building and managing effective, streamlined and flexible systems for fiscal management and accounting and will provide direct supervision to EFF’s Accounting Manager. This is not your typical “numbers geek” position, yet a “numbers geek” you must be. The ideal candidate will help us implement best practices while being flexible enough to adapt those practices to EFF’s unique culture.

Fiscal Management Responsibilities:

• Oversee all accounting functions including general ledger, monthly close, grants management and reporting, financial statement preparation, and budget versus actuals.
• Ensure that financial controls are implemented and monitored.
• Develop accounting and financial policies and procedures, review current procedures, and monitor for compliance.
• Manage cash flow and cash forecasting.
• Review bank and investment statements for accuracy.
• Review bi-monthly payroll reports for accuracy.
• Review bills as they are received to ensure they reasonably reflect actual charges. Determine whether we can find more economical options for some of our regular charges.
• Facilitate preparation of EFF’s annual independent audit.
• Oversee preparation of IRS, state, and local taxes and reports.
• Review our current accounting system (Quickbooks) to determine if it can be updated to meet our growing needs or if we need to upgrade to a more robust system. Facilitate the upgrade to a more robust accounting system, if necessary.
• Work with EFF’s Executive Director to create the organization’s annual operating budget.
• Work with the fundraising and project teams to develop project budgets for grant applications and reports.
• Review EFF’s corporate insurance packages on a yearly basis to ensure that our coverages are adequate.
• Implement and oversee a per diem system for employees who travel.
• Administer EFF’s flexible spending accounts (FSAs) and 403(b) retirement benefits.
• Direct the tracking of employee personal time off (PTO) hours.
• Oversee our nonprofit exemption of California property taxes.
• Work with our contractor to ensure that EFF is properly registered as a charity in all necessary states.
• Work with EFF’s fundraising team to establish a protocol for reconciling on a monthly basis our accounting system with our membership database.
• Perform special projects under the direction of EFF’s Executive Director.
• Other duties as assigned.

Professional Experience:

• Minimum five years of related experience at a nonprofit organization.
• Bachelor’s degree in business, accounting, finance, or related discipline preferred; MBA/Accounting or CPA is even better.

Vital Qualities:

• Experience working with Quickbooks or other accounting software package and a donor database or customer relationship management (CRM) software package. EFF uses CiviCRM, an open-source software suite.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Ability to present information clearly and effectively.
• Highly resourceful, flexible, entrepreneurial, and with an excellent work ethic.
• Flexibility to work in an environment where each employee assumes multiple responsibilities.
• Team-focused and willing to assist other departments as needed.
• Appreciation of an intellectual, focused, unconventional and creative office culture.
• Commitment to team-based brainstorming, planning, and decision-making.
• Passion for justice, technology, free speech, privacy, innovation, and a better digital future worldwide.

EFF offers outstanding benefits, including health, dental and vision insurance, retirement account with employer contributions, 14 paid holidays a year, 20 PTO days a year, and more. Most importantly, EFF is an amazing place to work. Everyone is dedicated not only to protecting civil liberties online, but also to creating a supportive and fun culture in which to do a tremendous amount of high profile work. If you think you’d like to be a part of our team, please send your resume, references and a cover letter with your salary requirements to careers@eff.org. This is a full-time position based in EFF’s office in San Francisco, CA. Inquiries about whether this job can be done remotely or part-time will not be answered. No phone calls please!