About MODA Vi

MODA Vi is a private think tank specializing in City-Centric Economics. We apply Nobel Prize winning research to help independent businesses thrive in urban environments dominated by national chains. Our work is grounded in partnerships with civic actors: pastors, teachers, artists, and organizers who form the core of our Civic Partner network.

Commitment to Equity

MODA Vi is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We encourage applications from individuals of all backgrounds, especially those historically underrepresented in economics and policy research. We prioritize intellectual diversity, lived experience, and community insight alongside academic credentials.

About MODA Vi

MODA Vi is a private think tank specializing in City-Centric Economics. We design operational and technological systems that help independent businesses and civic institutions thrive in competitive urban environments. Our software efforts focus on building usable civic infrastructure through tools, platforms, and data systems that support more equitable participation in local economies.

About the Role

We're seeking a Full Stack Software Engineer to help build systems for civic innovation. This role requires technical depth with mission-driven design, ideal for developers who want to build scalable applications in service of democratic infrastructure and community resilience. You'll work alongside researchers, organizers, and urban strategists to design full-stack systems that translate civic theory into digital tools used by real communities.

What You'll Build

• Full-stack product features across Django/FastAPI backends and React & Electron frontends
• Internal tools and dashboards that surface city-level metrics, system insights, and admin workflows
• User-facing components for authentication, identity verification, and data input
• APIs and data models that support modular civic infrastructure
• Lightweight integrations with ML services for community behavior insights
• Shared component libraries and developer-facing utilities to improve internal velocity
• Technical documentation and architectural notes for long-term clarity and maintainability

What You Bring

• Proficiency in Python, TypeScript, and modern React
• Experience building and maintaining full-stack systems using Django or FastAPI
• Familiarity with frontend state management, UI libraries, and design systems
• Working knowledge of PostgreSQL, REST API design, and backend data modeling
• Comfort with CI/CD workflows using tools like Docker, GitHub Actions, or Terraform
• Ability to write clean, maintainable code and communicate clearly across teams
• Curiosity about civic systems, local institutions, and real-world data modeling
• Strong written and technical communication skills

Commitment to Equity

MODA Vi is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We are committed to building civic systems that reflect and support the communities they serve. We strongly encourage candidates from historically underrepresented backgrounds in technology, economics, and AI to apply. We value technical excellence, civic insight, and lived experience equally. We believe infrastructure that serves diverse communities must be built by teams that understand them.

About MODA Vi

MODA Vi is a private think tank specializing in City-Centric Economics. We design operational and technological systems that help independent businesses and civic institutions thrive in competitive urban environments. Our software efforts focus on scalable civic infrastructure. This includes platforms, protocols, and data systems that enable more equitable participation in local economies

About the Role

We're seeking a Platform Engineer to help design, scale, and harden the core infrastructure behind our civic systems. This role is ideal for engineers who build with architectural discipline and a strong sense of purpose. You'll collaborate with a multidisciplinary team of researchers, organizers, and systems designers to translate complex civic workflows into resilient technical primitives that cities and communities can rely on. You'll work across backend systems, cloud infrastructure, SDK design, and compliance-layer architecture with equal fluency.

What You'll Build

• Identity & Access

  Design WebAuthn/FIDO2 passkey flows and OAuth 2.1/OIDC authorization, aiming for <150 ms p95 login latency and strictly idempotent token revocation.

• Event Pipelines

  Move tens of millions of city-scale events from curb to warehouse in <90 s end-to-end (raw → validated → query-ready), with schema-evolution versioning baked in.

• Distributed Services

  Architect self-healing, multi-region micro-services that keep p99 requests under 200 ms while surviving a full AZ loss without breaching a 99.99% uptime SLA.

• Predictive Analytics

  Serve engagement scores from stateless ML micro-services that sustain 10k RPS inference with single-digit-ms tail latency, feeding both REST and gRPC endpoints.

• Developer Tooling

  Ship drop-in SDKs (npm i civic-sdk, pod 'CivicSDK') and embeddable UI widgets that let local orgs light up maps, metrics, and verification checks in under five minutes.

• Privacy & Compliance

  Enforce field-level encryption, granular ABAC, and tamper-evident append-only logs—keeping us audit-ready for GDPR, CCPA, and SOC 2 Type II without a fire drill.

• Architecture & Ops Docs

  Capture ADRs, run-books, and OpenAPI contracts so a new city can stand up the entire stack in a single sprint—no insider needed.

What You Bring

• Experience implementing modern authentication and authorization protocols, including WebAuthn, FIDO2, OAuth 2.1, and OpenID Connect
• Proficiency in Python, TypeScript, Swift, and Go
• Experience building and maintaining backend systems using FastAPI or Django
• Strong understanding of PostgreSQL, relational data modeling, and schema evolution in production systems
• Ability to design and deploy distributed services with failover, autoscaling, and multi-region infrastructure using AWS (EC2, RDS, S3, Lambda)
• Familiarity with low-latency ML inference services and experience using frameworks like TensorFlow, PyTorch, or scikit-learn
• Proficiency in writing and maintaining SDKs and dev tools for external developer consumption
• Familiarity with REST and gRPC API design under high throughput and low tail latency constraints
• Experience implementing encryption, ABAC models, and append-only logging in compliance-sensitive environments
• Working knowledge of regulatory frameworks such as GDPR, CCPA, and SOC 2 Type II
• Ability to write and maintain Architecture Decision Records (ADRs), run-books, and OpenAPI specifications
• Comfort working in CI/CD environments with tools like Docker, Terraform, GitHub Actions, or CircleCI
• Clear, precise technical communication and a systems-oriented development approach

Commitment to Equity

MODA Vi is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We are committed to building civic systems that reflect and support the communities they serve. We strongly encourage candidates from historically underrepresented backgrounds in technology, economics, and AI to apply. We value technical excellence, civic insight, and lived experience equally. We believe infrastructure that serves diverse communities must be built by teams that understand them.

About MODA Vi

MODA Vi is a private think tank specializing in City-Centric Economics. We design civic systems that empower independent businesses and institutions to thrive in urban spaces where chain dominance is the norm. Our AI/ML efforts focus on translating urban economic theory into predictive, equitable, and actionable infrastructure. This includes platforms, protocols, and prediction systems used by community institutions and civic decision-makers.

About the Role

We're seeking a Senior AI/ML Engineer to architect and deploy intelligent systems that support urban economic analysis, community trust mapping, and scalable civic tooling. This role is ideal for engineers with strong systems thinking, production-grade rigor, and a track record of turning models into operational software. You'll work alongside researchers, organizers, and platform engineers to design and deploy LLM-integrated applications, agentic workflows, and proprietary algorithms that help communities organize, adapt, and allocate resources with greater precision.

What You'll Build

• Integrated Infrastructure

  Design and deploy multi-step, multi-agent systems including orchestration logic, contextual memory layers, retrieval pipelines, and structured output validators.

• Urban Prediction Systems

  Serve civic trust scores, engagement likelihoods, and behavioral forecasts from pipelines that update in near-real time. Everything vectorized, low-latency, numerically stable.

• Civic Recommendation Engines

  Build modular systems for partner matching, resource allocation, and policy simulation. Tuned for sparse data, limited compute, and institutions with no ops team.

• Semantic Parsing & Narrative Analysis

  Deploy NLP models that extract structured signals from civic feedback, institutional memory, and open-text sentiment across messy, multilingual sources.

• MLOps & Deployment Pipelines

  Run the full lifecycle (training → evaluation → versioning → deployment) on pipelines built for reproducibility and zero-downtime rollouts. Artifacts tracked & outputs auditable.

• Internal Agents

  Build autonomous internal tools scoped for data analysis, report generation, and operational reasoning. Agents are sandboxed, composable, and hallucination tempered.

• Applied Economic Intelligence

  Implement civic and economic models using constraint logic, utility scoring, and sparse matrix factorization. Use block matrix operations, eigensystems, and projection operators for precision under load.

What You Bring

• Advanced degree (Master's or Ph.D.) in Computer Science, Data Science, or a related field
• Proficiency in Python and core scientific libraries (NumPy, pandas, SciPy)
• 3+ years of experience with machine learning frameworks (TensorFlow, PyTorch, scikit-learn)
• Familiarity with MLOps tooling for versioning, deployment, and monitoring
• Experience engineering agentic systems and working with at least two current LLM frameworks (PydanticAI, LangChain, LangGraph, Autogen, CrewAI, etc.)
• Working knowledge of prompt engineering, retrieval pipelines, and memory graphs
• Awareness of emerging LLM protocols and architectures (e.g. MCP, NLWeb, A2A) and ability to integrate new abstractions as they land
• Strong grasp of statistical methods, experimental design, and evaluation metrics
• Applied use of time series analysis and behavioral modeling
• Comfort working with sparse matrices, projection operators, and eigensystems
• Able to collaborate with engineers, researchers, and domain experts without slowing down

Commitment to Equity

MODA Vi is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We are committed to building civic systems that reflect and support the communities they serve. We strongly encourage candidates from historically underrepresented backgrounds in technology, economics, and AI to apply. We value technical excellence, civic insight, and lived experience equally. We believe infrastructure that serves diverse communities must be built by teams that understand them.

About MODA Vi

MODA Vi is a private think tank focused on City-Centric Economics. We partner with independent businesses and community institutions to help them thrive in cities dominated by national chains. Our research translates into operational strategies and civic infrastructure deployed across multiple U.S. cities.

About the Role

We're hiring a Data Analyst to uncover and interpret community-level economic behavior patterns within MODA Vi's Civic Partner network. This role is ideal for someone with strong analytical skills and a passion for urban systems, public policy, or economic justice. Your insights will directly inform policy briefs, tool development, and institutional strategy.

Key Responsibilities

• Analyze community economic behavior patterns across MODA Vi's active cities
• Create dashboards and visualizations tracking civic partner program effectiveness
• Conduct statistical analysis on trust-building and economic circulation metrics
• Support research team with quantitative analysis for policy briefs and white papers
• Design and implement data collection protocols for field studies
• Collaborate with external researchers on academic publications and reports

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Statistics, Economics, Data Science, or related field
• 2+ years experience with data analysis tools (Python, R, SQL)
• Proficiency in data visualization tools (Tableau, matplotlib, plotly)
• Strong statistical analysis skills and experience with A/B testing
• Experience with survey design and qualitative data analysis
• Knowledge of urban economics or public policy preferred
• Excellent written communication and presentation skills

Commitment to Equity

MODA Vi is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We are committed to building civic systems that reflect and support the communities they serve. We strongly encourage candidates from historically underrepresented backgrounds in technology, economics, and AI to apply. We value technical excellence, civic insight, and lived experience equally. We believe infrastructure that serves diverse communities must be built by teams that understand them.

About the Program

The MODA Vi Civic Innovation Fellowship is a structured internship experience designed for undergraduate and graduate students passionate about civic systems, urban economics, and community-led innovation. Fellows support real projects that shape the future of city-based commerce and institutional infrastructure, working alongside our research, design, and strategy teams.

This internship offers exposure to real-world civic challenges, hands-on project work, and mentorship from cross-disciplinary professionals. Many past fellows have used their MODA Vi experience to advance in policy, tech, or public impact roles.

Ideal Candidates

We welcome applicants from both academic and nontraditional backgrounds who demonstrate precision, curiosity, and a long-term interest in civic innovation. You may be a good fit if you are:

• Enrolled in or recently graduated from a program in economics, sociology, political science, urban studies, design, or computer science
• Skilled in writing, research, data analysis, or digital design/development
• Interested in how systems shape public life, equity, and economic behavior
• Organized, self-directed, and excited to collaborate in a fast-paced team

What You'll Do

Depending on interest and team placement, interns may:

• Contribute to research and field data analysis
• Assist in drafting internal memos, briefs, or white papers
• Support pilot programs with Civic Partner institutions
• Participate in tool design, UI mockups, or systems mapping
• Collaborate on community insights and operational strategy

Additional Information

While this internship is unpaid, fellows receive mentorship, access to professional development resources, and eligibility for course credit or faculty sponsorship where applicable. We also provide portfolio and reference support to help interns transition into public interest careers.

Commitment to Equity

MODA Vi is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We believe civic innovation must reflect diverse lived experiences and value interdisciplinary thinking. We strongly encourage applications from individuals from historically underrepresented communities, including those early in their academic or professional journey.