UX Developer

Description

Introduction:

As one of the 15 schools at Harvard University, Harvard Business School (HBS) is located just across the river in Boston, a short walk from Harvard Square in Cambridge. HBS educates leaders who make a difference in the world. With a team of librarians, researchers, educators, statisticians, journalists, information management professionals, product designers, and archivists, Knowledge and Library Services (KLS) offers unparalleled resources and services to the HBS community. The User Experience (UX) Developer will help Harvard Business School faculty, staff, students, alumni and global scholars to access and understand all that KLS/Baker Library has to offer through revolutionizing the Baker 3.0 ecosystem.

Baker 3.0 is becoming the one trusted “place” (virtual and physical) that the HBS scholarly community comes to first to meet their information needs through a functional framework enabling scholarship across the HBS community and forming the bedrock for the work of KLS (content and information access, curation, dissemination, preservation).

Using the Baker 3.0 ecosystem of content, expertise, infrastructure, and products and services, HBS scholars can discover, access and use the most relevant, high-quality information and services they need regardless of where they are, what devices they use, or where that information or HBS priority content lives. For more information about Baker Library, visit us at https://www.library.hbs.edu/

Summary Description:

Reporting to the Director, Baker 3.0 Strategy and Infrastructure and partnering closely with HBS Information Technology (IT) and KLS teams, the UX Developer will work to help design and develop / implement next-generation search and discovery applications for HBS.

We are looking for an innovative front-end developer with strong communication and listening skills, a rock-solid technical background in UI/UX technologies and a record of working with developers, the KLS UX team, and domain-experts in providing content-based, search-enabled services. We are in the midst of a long-range strategy to overhaul the KLS public presence in order to become an integrated, personalized, semantically-based experience.

Key Responsibilities:

·         Design and collaborate with domain-experts and IT to develop and support a world-class, next-generation search and discovery platform

·         Understand, integrate, and support, as necessary, specialized information technologies currently in use, interfacing with HBS personnel in KLS, IT, and HU IT/HL IT, as well as other information professionals, vendors, and contractors

·         Incrementally improve the user experience in our current environment, working on a variety of problems from building entire microsites to refining search-results processing.

Basic Qualifications (Required):

·         M.S. in Information Science, Computer Science or related field; with an emphasis on UI/UX development. We will also consider strong BS candidates with related background and industry experience in content-based web and client applications

·         Minimum of seven (7) years’ experience in a technical environment. (Candidates with less than 7 years of experience will be considered at a grade 57)

·         Results-oriented with strong verbal, interpersonal, written, and management skills

·         Highly innovative, flexible and self-directed, but also a co-operative team player

·         Strong foundation in system design, software architecture, web technologies, and information retrieval

·         Demonstrated ability to collaborate with software engineers to find technical solutions to design problems. Work in an agile-like environment to deliver high quality software against aggressive schedules

·         Knowledge and proven ability to work with the following technology stacks: LAMP, pHp, SQL (MS SQL Server and/or MySQL), Excel

·         Experience developing UX / UI for content management systems using CSS- and JavaScript-based libraries - jQuery, knockout, bootstrap, SASS, etc.

·         Working knowledge of information retrieval frameworks (Apache Lucene/Solr and elasticsearch)

·         Familiarity with software engineering tools and processes (git, ant/maven, Jira, ansible)

Additional Qualifications (Preferred):

·         Experience with eZPublish and Symfony (or ability to learn these as part of career / professional development)

·         Experience manipulating semantic knowledge sources (thesauri, ontologies, semantic lexicons, semantic networks, etc.) for use in information retrieval environments, and semantic technologies – ex: RDF, SKOS and OWL

·         Ability to deal well with ambiguous and undefined problems.

·         Excellent relationship building skills, especially team work and customer service skills.

·         Demonstrated intuitive analytical and problem-solving skills to address and resolve technical issues, often in a limited timeframe

·         Process management experience – eliciting and documenting requirements, with minimal direction, that result in quality deliverables

·         Highly motivated individual, devoted to continuous self-development and learning

Our expectations are that employees of HBS adhere to and represent our Community Values.  They are:

·         Respect for the rights, differences, and dignity of others

·         Honesty and integrity in dealing with all members of the community

·         Accountability for personal behavior