Comments
I think I agree with Jack on the AI side.
If you can get a job at Anthropic, Redwood, maybe OpenAI or Deepmind or other AI companies, those might be better than most software startups.
The first 1-2 years of software engineering work can be amazing for the experience. It really can depend on what team you work with though. Some have great standards and help train junior engineers. Others don't, and won't teach decent practices. My intuition is that the startup you're considering is likely good (startups with lots of respect in tech circles, like Stripe, can be great), but I suggest asking some people who work there.
Many of the EA tech groups are much smaller or very early, so won't be able to provide the same experience. (and, if you join them anyway after, you'll get the experience they do provide then, anyway). Just chat to people in them and see what mentorship they can provide.
2 years seems like a bit much to me. If you join the software engineering role (and it's not directly EA), I'd suggest being really intense about it if you can. Try to learn as much as possible, as quickly as possible. Then, after 12 months, gauge how much you're learning (and maybe, how quickly the stock options are rising in value) and decide things from then.
For me, I found that my first real "junior developer job" was incredibly interesting and useful, but the work got pretty boring after around 6 months. I left around 14 months in, and in retrospect, sort of wish I left ~2 months sooner.
One other thing to note: try to learn full-stack skills, not narrow domain skills. Spending 1-2 years on a company-specific database solution is bad, doing it with similar tools to what a tiny startup would use is good (for many EA sorts of things)
Personally, I'm excited about more strong generalist EAs having 1-2 years of strong software engineering experience. Software engineering comes up all over the place. It's a highly general-purpose skill. It would give you a bunch of options later on.
Maybe you're already thinking this, but specifically for community building / meta-EA career paths, my impression is doing 2 years of meta-EA would be much better (in terms of both career capital and direct impact) than 2 years of software engineering at a startup. Intuitions behind this include:
(I guess the exception would be if you want to do meta-EA through software engineering.)
My questions would be: do you want to do community building an EAR projects in 5-10 years, and do you really have great community-building opportunities now (good org, good strategy for impact, some mentorship)?
If yes for both, then doing community-building looks good. It aids your trajectory moreso than software. It won't sacrifice much career/financial security, since software is not that credential-based; you can return to it later. And going into community building now won't raise any more eyebros than doing it in two years would.
If no for one or both questions, e.g. if you see yourself as suited to AIS engineering, then software might be better.
I don't feel more than 50% confident that I want to do a community-building or meta-EA career path. Community-building might be over-represented in the career plan I sketched out above, as until a few days ago, I hadn't seriously considered the idea that software engineering or machine learning engineering for AI safety were things that I could be qualified to contribute to.
(Previously, I thought that AI safety ML engineering positions were exceedingly competitive, and I didn't know that software engineering for AI safety was much of a thing. My update was from browsing the Anthropic job board and noticing the lack of hard requirements for many of these positions, and from people on the EA Corner Discord thinking it was doable to get an AI safety position. I also re-read "AI Safety Needs Great Engineers" with a fresh perspective. The first time I read it, I was thinking, "wow, I have no idea how to write a substantial pull request to a major machine learning library; therefore, I can't work in AI safety". The second time I read it, I paid more attention to the sentence "Based on the people working here already, 'great software engineer' and 'easy to get on with' are hard requirements, but the things in the list above are very much nice-to-haves, with several folks having just one or none of them.")
OK, then it sounds like a tricky judgment call. I guess you could ask: compared to most technically-minded EA students, do you have a comparative advantage in social skills vs coding, or the reverse? And are your community-related job offers more selective and impressive than the software ones, or the reverse?