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:

• Community building experience seems to be highly valued by meta-EA employers / grantmakers / cofounders, because of its clear relevance
• Maybe the impacts of community building are cumulative, which makes additional work early on especially valuable
• I'd guess recent graduates tend to have a much easier time becoming friends with university students than older people (and anecdotally, these friendships seem super important for community builders' impact)
• Getting more meta-EA experience soon would help prepare you to take on management/mentorship roles or otherwise more ambitious projects in meta-EA sooner. More generally, if impact per year grows as one gets more relevant experience, then starting earlier lets you have more time at the heights of your ability to have impact.

(I guess the exception would be if you want to do meta-EA through software engineering.)

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.

FYI If finances are any constraint for you, community building is going to have a really hard time paying you much (as is the case for past and present full-time community builders).

• Build career capital relevant for things like software engineering or machine learning engineering for AI safety.

Random, but a piece of advice that I've heard is that career capital for these things is only useful for getting your foot in the door (e.g. getting a coding test) and then your actually performance (rather than your resume) is what ends up getting you/not getting you the job. If you think you can succeed at this, I think it would almost certainly be better to just directly optimize for getting to a performance level that's good enough for the AI safety job you want, rather than spending a few years software engineering (which might still be useful, but would be a less optimal way to spend your time, probably). I recommend reaching out to any AI safety orgs you hope to work at to confirm whether this is the case, in case you can get a few additional years of impact.

ETA: That said, ignoring personal fit, probably: AI safety paths where you skip the SWE ~= community building path >> software engineering at a start-up

Also, if you want to chat about Lightcone and/or Redwood, I'm doing work trials for both of their generalist roles (currently at Redwood, switching to Lightcone soon)--feel free to DM me for my Calendly :)

1. Would you tell us more about where you think you'd have better personal fit / what you'd wake up enthusiastic to do?
2. Maybe there's some creative solution where the other student communities still come up even if you don't run them? (Perhaps you could delegate this and only mentor the community leaders, or something like that?)

I'd suggest joining a graduate software position for 12 months and then seeing where you are after that as I do think that the opportunity cost of missing the graduate programs could be pretty high.