Application Developer

Description

Who We Are:

The Canadian Research Knowledge Network is a partnership of Canadian universities, dedicated to expanding digital content for the academic research and teaching enterprise in Canada. On April 1st, 2018 CRKN merged with Canadiana.org to allow our teams to cohesively pursue a united and coordinated strategy on leveraging Canadian heritage and scholarly content. As a merged organization, CRKN will continue its core licensing activities for scholarly journal content, while expanding support for the digitization, access and preservation of Canadian heritage content through the services of Canadiana.

The Canadiana Platform Team manages the Canadiana Preservation and Access platform, consisting of our Trustworthy Digital Repository and the access platform associated with its preserved content. We work on ensuring that digitized content can be ingested into our system, distributed across the country, and made accessible to our member institutions and the greater public. Work in 2018 will focus on migrating our preservation platform to Archivematica, and implementing IIIF specifications within our access platform; in short, we are looking to engage with the wider digital humanities community and adopt common technologies.

The Role:

Reporting to the Lead Application Developer, the Application Developer implements and maintains features, services and capabilities of the Canadiana platform. The Application Developer will work on interactive front-end applications, back-end systems and application program interfaces (APIs) for the repository and related services. The Developer is responsible for facilitating discovery of and access to content and metadata stored in the repository.

The successful candidate will have the opportunity to learn and grow as a key member of a small but ambitious team. As the successful candidate you will bring to the role a diversity of development and interpersonal skillsets. You are creative and adaptable in how you solve problems and address new challenges.

Duties and Responsibilities:

•  Assist the Lead Application Developer with analysis of functional requirements and creation of technical specifications, and the design of software and data structures
• Research tools and practices used in software development pertaining to the team's overall development direction
• Write, test, debug and document software to meet functional requirements and specifications
• Deploy applications to testing and production servers
• Evaluate bug reports and determine possible solutions
• Implement, test, deploy and verify bug fixes and solutions to problems as they arise
• Update web application templates, databases and content
• Keep up to date on the standards, practices and technologies in the gallery, library, archives and museum (GLAM) technical sector, by attending talks or webinars, and engaging in self-directed research

Qualifications:

• A Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field. Candidates without a degree will be considered if they have equivalent work experience
• Public code samples (i.e. show us your Github)
• A minimum of two years of experience in software development
• Familiarity with linked data and semantic web concepts and standards, such as JSON-LD, RDF, SPARQL, IIIF
• Comfort conceptualizing about the distribution of data and services in the cloud
• Proficiency with multiple scripting and programming languages, including JavaScript. Competency in Perl, Python and Ruby are also valuable to the role.
• Effectiveness with front-end web development using HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and familiar with front-end web frameworks such as React
• Experience with revision control systems such as Git and Subversion and their best practices
• Experience with using Docker for development and deployment
• Ability to adapt to changing technologies in a fast-paced environment
• Strong documentation and technical writing skills, and good verbal communication skills
• Ability to work effectively with a team
• Reliability Status from PWGSC is an asset

CRKN offers a generous benefits package including vacation, health and dental benefits and pension match.

To Apply:

Interested candidates should submit their application, including a copy of their resume and a cover letter, to hr@crkn.ca. Candidates are also strongly encouraged to reference their public portfolio of code samples to demonstrate the diversity and variety of their skills and experience. We thank all applicants for their interest in CRKN, however only those candidates selected for an interview will be contacted.

If you require accommodation during the recruitment process, please include in your cover letter when applying for the position and all efforts to provide the appropriate accommodation will be put into place.