Ask HN: Where can I work as a software engineer to combat large global problems?

I have a Ph.D. in CS and enjoy solving open-ended technical challenges. I have a decent hands-on experience in operating systems and software engineering. I’ve been working as a full-stack engineer building Android products for almost a decade now.

I want to switch to work on larger global problems that are also technically challenging. So far I’ve recognized following job profiles-

Combatting climate change:

* Reducing the power consumption of data centers. Data centers consume ~2% of global electricity consumption and are estimated to consume up to 8% by 2030 due to the ML boom. Example roles: Site efficiency teams in Big 4.

* Building systems to support autonomous vehicles. Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from transportation account for about 29 percent of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, making it the largest contributor to U.S. GHG emissions. Autonomous vehicles are projected to reduce per-mile greenhouse gas emissions by up to 94%. Example roles: system performance teams at getcruise.com, tri.global

I am wondering if there are other software engineering/research roles I should apply to. Roles that combat global challenges and are also technically interesting.

Android is FULL of malware. Being able to detect that shouldn't be too hard considering google rarely detects it quickly. (odd strings in APKs, traffic to suspicious ASNs, traffic to low rank domains). There are many reports online about android malware to look at to find patterns to detect future malware. Many reporters around the world are running malicious software on their phones and have no idea.

Great report to listen to about it here. https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/48/

Warning. The darknetdiary episodes are ADDICTING. Awesome stuff!

Posted link to wrong episode. Correct episode about journalists and smart phones.. https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/38/

Artificial Intelligence safety is considered by some to be the biggest, and potentially most dangerous challenge in the coming decades.

I've recently found a post on the Effective Altruism forum encouraging people to consider starting a computer security career to help mitigate the AI risk:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ZJiCfwTy5dC4CoxqA/...

These are a couple of high level problems...

A large global problem is still starvation, millions of people dying every year. Work on helping countries feed themselves.

Majority of the world does not have access to internet, decentralised peer to peer networks could help here.

True. Starvation is a big problem. I don't know if software can even help here, but do you know of companies taking such an approach to solving this?

Thanks for the pointer about the internet. I will check out Project Loon and Internet.org.