Quality & Integrity Lead, YSWS

The Role

Every month, thousands of teenagers around the world ship real projects (games, websites, hardware, apps) through Hack Club's You Ship We Ship (YSWS) programs. In exchange, we send them free hardware, invites + flights to in-person hackathons, and grants to keep learning and making technical projects. It's one of the most ambitious programs in youth tech education.

Here's how it works: teens submit projects, program authors review and approve them, and approved projects enter our database. The program authors who run each YSWS program (Boba Drops, Summer of Making, Blueprint, etc.) handle the primary reviews.

Here's what we need:Someone to QA the reviewers. A second set of eyes. A spot-checker who can tell us: "Are the program authors making good calls? Are we catching the fake projects? Are we being too harsh on legitimate ones?"

This isn't a "sit in a queue reviewing every project" job. It's a quality assurance role focused on:

• Spot-checking approved projects
  — Random sampling to catch issues program authors missed

• Auditing review quality
  — Are reviewers consistent? Are they catching fraud? Being fair?

• Creating standards
  — What does "high quality" and "high integrity" actually mean?

• Training program authors
  — Teaching them to make better review decisions

• Handling escalations
  — Appeals, investigations, and edge cases

• Building for scale
  — Systems that work at 100k projects/year, not just 25k

You'll still do plenty of hands-on review work yourself—you can't spot-check effectively without understanding the projects deeply. But your primary mission is ensuring the integrity of the entire approval process, not being the bottleneck for every project.

Quality Assurance on Reviews

• Randomly sample approved projects to verify review quality

• Track and report on issue rates across programs and reviewers

• Identify patterns: what are we catching? what are we missing?

• Flag concerning trends before they become problems

Standards & Training

• Define what "high quality" and "high integrity" mean for YSWS projects

• Create review rubrics and documented examples for different project types

• Train program authors on making better, more consistent decisions

• Run calibration sessions so everyone reviews the same way

• Write documentation that explains the "why" behind decisions

Investigations & Escalations

• Handle flagged projects that need deeper investigation

• Process appeals from users who disagree with decisions

• Make judgment calls on ambiguous cases—and document your reasoning

• Say "no" clearly and kindly when needed, with actionable feedback

Systems & Scale

• Design workflows that catch problems before projects ship

• Eventually: help train AI tools using your frameworks

• Build processes that work at 100k projects/year

• Automate what can be automated; stay human where it matters

• Reviewing every single project (program authors do primary reviews)

• Being a bottleneck in the approval flow

• Checking boxes on a form

• Waiting for someone to tell you what to do

This is a role for someone who can look at a process, figure out where it's breaking, fix it, and teach others to maintain the fix.

In 90 Days:

• You've reviewed 500+ projects and documented common patterns

• First draft of review criteria exists with clear "why" explanations

• You can articulate what makes a project "legitimate" vs "suspicious"

• Program authors are getting regular feedback on their review quality

• Zach (Executive Director) and Max (YSWS Director) have stopped thinking about QA decisions

In 6 Months:

• Comprehensive guidelines are documented and teachable

• Program authors apply criteria consistently across programs

• Issue rate on spot checks drops from 46% to under 20%

• Appeals process exists and is documented

• You're handling investigations independently

In 1 Year:

• System scales to 100k projects/year

• AI tools are implemented around your frameworks for basic checks

• Quality is a solved problem that you own end-to-end

• Program authors trust the process and improve continuously

Have Good Judgment

• Can tell the difference between "broke the rules" and "gaming the system"

• Understand that teenagers deserve both trust AND…