Do you remember your family’s first computer? Were you early adopters with an Apple IIe? Or did you have a Gateway 2000 (back when 2000 was futuristic) that came with a free month of AOL? Was it the original Macintosh or a later Performa model? If you remember that computer better than you remember your first grade teacher, today’s job will be right up your alley.

One Laptop Per Child is a non-profit organization that was founded by faculty members of the MIT Media Lab to offer children across the world educational opportunities through laptop ownership. Based on 5 Core Principles of Child Ownership, Low Ages, Saturation, Connection, and Free and Open Source, OLPC is looking to change millions of lives by allowing children to explore, experiment, and express themselves. Their original goal was to create a $100 laptop that could be purchased and then donated, but somewhere along the way it became a $200 laptop. OLPC has actually put together a pretty incredible piece of hardware at this price point; in fact, you can get your hands on one through the end of the year with OLPC’s Give one, get one program. The point of the project isn’t to make cheap laptops, so you can’t just buy one, but you can donate one.

Don’t understand why giving children in developing countries a laptop is so important? Check out Our Stories – a collection of experiences from children who have already started using OLPC computers. If you want a laugh, read Valleywag’s satire on Our Stories. Since OLPC is such a high tech project, it’s received a ton of online press. There are also some great web resources for more information about OLPC beyond their own site, Laptop.org. We especially recommend that you read OLPC’s Wiki and the Wikipedia entry on the $100 Laptop.

One Laptop Per Child is currently hiring for a number of technical positions, including: Security Software Engineer, Documentation Lead, Back-End Services Engineer, Software Engineer, and School Server Software Engineer. The job descriptions for these positions are short, but sweet – just a basic overview of the skills needed for the job. We’ve singled out the jobs that don’t mention necessary experience and could be appropriate for new grads. Many of the technical requirements (like programming languages) are a little over our heads, so we could be wrong about some of these positions. We were also a little perplexed because many of the job descriptions say, “knowledge of multiple languages is a plus.” We aren’t sure whether they mean spoken languages or computer languages – although both talents would be a good thing. Our guess is that they mean spoken languages, since these laptops will be sent to so many different countries. If you love technology, have great software development skills, and want to be a part of educating the world’s children, do some research on OLPC. For those who choose to apply, each job listing has it’s own e-mail address to which you can send a cover letter and resume.

We can’t find much more information on what it’s like working for One Laptop Per Child, but we think that any company or organization that has a 4 word name that starts with One has to be pretty good.

Note: On April 26th we revisited entry-level jobs at One Laptop Per Child.

Links to Help You Begin Your Research

• The One Laptop Per Child Home Page
• Jobs at One Laptop Per Child
• The OLPC Wiki
• OLPC’s Vision
• Our Stories: OLPC Successes
• The Laptop

Remember your first computer? What was it? Tell us in the comments.

We've identified One Laptop Per Child as having career opportunities in the following categories:

• all employers
• information technology
• Massachusetts
• non-profit
• software development

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