Community Guide - remote

At Hack Club (https://hackclub.com), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, we're building a giant video game, but instead of being made out of bits and code, it's made out of teenagers. And instead of pushing players to get a high score, Hack Club helps teenagers learn to code, build the most meaningful friendships of their lives, and develop strong identities to become the future leaders our world needs.

Alongside the soccer players, theater kids, and band geeks, we aspire to create a new type of high schooler: the teenage hacker. Our goal: to become as ubiquitous, as universal, and as culturally foundational for young people today as the Girl and Boy Scouts were 70 years ago.

Title: Community Game Designer

Job Description:

You'd be our 6th full-time staff member. Your role would be to own and grow the Hack Club online community (11,000 high schoolers on our Slack).

This is not a normal job. You need to have a background in programming, but you should be obsessed about how to make things fun. How do you create a world with more depth and lore than Runescape? That has better feedback loops than Valorant? Is more social than Among Us? And more inclusive than Animal Crossing?

As head "world builder" of the Hack Club online universe, you'll work with our community to create the best and most inclusive place on the internet for technical teenagers.

A formal list of your responsibilities would be something like:

• Lead our student community team, have daily communication with them, and be a mentor to every Hack Clubber within it. This team brought Elon Musk to chat with Hack Clubbers and created a network of bots in our Slack that do everything from onboard new students to implementing Uno in Slack.
• Game design the Slack to better help students form meaningful relationships. Good online hacker friendships are more durable than regular teenage friendships because they don’t happen by circumstance, like sitting next to someone in class and figuring you might as well become friends because you’re stuck together for the year.
• Act as a mentor to our community of 10,000 teenage hackers. Have 1:1 conversations with students ranging from answering coding questions to riffing on the meaning of life to co-conspiring on the next community quest.
• Be a point of contact for inquisitive parents

And a bit about what we suspect you'll be like:

• You're technical, self-taught, and began learning to code in high school or earlier
• You played an important role in an online community when you were a teenager. You could have roleplayed in Neopets, ran a trend-setting Tumblr, grown up on the Minecraft modding forums, created fanfiction on AO3, sold Runescape bots, ran a Club Penguin blog, been an artist on DeviantArt, been a moderator in an online MMO, created a YouTube channel when you were 12, helped grow an IRC network, or anything else along the same vein. (but even if you don't think you hit these, please apply anyway!)
• You embody the values of a model Hack Clubber: collaborative, kind, high integrity, helpful, and curious
• You have the traits of a wonderful friend: always encouraging, genuinely want to see students learn and figure out things on their own, excited to answer questions, and always wanting to help students find their own course of action
• You're excited to work 1:1 with high school students every day

Location: We have an in-person office in Burlington, Vermont. We'd love if you came and joined us here. We're also OK with remote, but you'd need to come here fairly regularly post-COVID. We can help you relocate.

To apply, email us at slackalacker@hackclub.com with "white rabbit" in the subject line. We don't think we'll be able to identify this person just by looking at their resume, so please include 300-400 words on your background relative to this role and why you're interested.

And last, some details on compensation. This role pays between $60K - $100K, depending on your experience—and we know that's probably less than you'd make elsewhere. We offer healthcare and 4 weeks paid vacation.

- Christina Asquith, COO, and Zach Latta, Executive Director