Full Stack Production and Development Support Specialist

Description

Human Relations Area Files at Yale University is seeking candidates to join our small software engineering team, under the supervision of our Software Engineering Team Leader, for a permanent (subject to probationary period) full-time or part-time position to assist in a range of activities required for producing, processing and distributing digital resources that relate to human life of a contemporary, historic and prehistoric nature.

Position Summary

• Grade Level 22. Salary range $50-65,000 + benefits, including medical.
• Start date December 1, or soon thereafter (remote possible in year 1)

The person in this position will contribute to a range of activities including digital document development, developing and maintaining data services, web client UI design, development and maintenance, and other software support for HRAF’s major collection of ethnographic and archaeological documents (eHRAF World Cultures and eHRAF Archaeology) distributed to our members over the internet via the WWW and other services. You will assume, as needed, increased levels of responsibility for some areas of operation.

You will need to be flexible as the activities you will be involved with are numerous and varied. We do not expect candidates to initially possess all the skills required in our operation, but you must be willing to learn these as needed. Skills required in our operations include coding in a number of computer languages, design and implementation of services, tasks related to document development in an XML environment, implementing web interfaces on both the server and client side, creating unit tests for existing and new code, identifying, documenting and fixing bugs, and participating in team discussions on design and implantation of new capabilities. Some knowledge and experience of data science and natural language programming would be useful as we are  integrating new capabilities based on these methods over the immediate future.

Position Focus

The Human Relations Area Files (HRAF) is a non-profit membership organization affiliated with Yale University, whose members are typically institutions of higher learning and/or research. Founded in 1949, HRAF is cooperative in nature and international in scope, collecting, organizing and distributing information of significance to the natural and social sciences and the humanities. The mission of HRAF is to promote understanding of cultural diversity in the past and present. To accomplish this mission the Human Relations Area Files produces and distributes scholarly resources for research and teaching and supports the conduct of original research on cultural variation. These resources include ethnographic and archaeological databases and associated digital services that assist students and researchers in locating, managing, analyzing and interpreting relevant information.

Responsibilities

• Provides solutions to issues in web production, deployment and development
• Manages document production, maintenance, and development; software deployment, maintenance and development.
• Develops and maintains:
  • New code and services
  • Unit tests for existing and new code
  • Automated processing steps for updating content
  • New features and services for the applications
  • New web pages and applications
  • Features and services leveraging automated text analysis
• Responds to maintenance problems with the applications and services
• Researches and creates strategies for implementing requested features
• Identifies, documents, and develops fixes to “bugs” in the applications and services
• Participates in team development discussions
• Perform other duties as assigned

Qualifications

Bachelor’s Degree in computer science or engineering, data science, or a related field, and at least 3 years of related work experience OR an equivalent combination of education and experience. We will, however, consider accomplished applicants from any background if they have strong supporting experience.

Required Skills

• Adaptable to a wide range of tasks and demands. Ability to work with limited supervision.
• Ability to code in one or more programming or scripting languages common to use in web services, developing over time skill in other languages not used before.
• Experience developing accessible web based UI using Javascript, ReactJS, HTML5, and CSS/SCSS. We presently use or are developing in mainly Node JS environments, with Java-based  legacy work and  a growing emphasis on Python.
• Experience with document-based applications, ideally using XML schemas, XPath, XQuery, and/or XSLT.
• Some experience with data science methods and/or natural language processing and an interest in developing more skills in this area.

Desired skills

• Experience in supporting or developing XML document-based applications in environments such as Oxygen or eXistDB.
• Experience in SQL relational database deployment or design. NoSQL database design and deployment experience also welcome.
• Experience in computational analysis of textual documents/fragments, especially with respect to text mining, text segment classification, textual summarization, or computational semantics.
• Experience with text-mining, natural language processing or other data science methods in any framework.
• Experience with semantic databases and related frameworks based on RDF or other technologies.
• Some knowledge of GIS applications and associated services and web interfaces.
• Experience in development and implementation of server-side services or client-side usage of services, in any framework or API. Coding in Javascript, Python and scripting languages in common use in a web context are considered valuable skills.
• Proficiency with Git/Github or other version control systems.
• Experience in Windows and/or Powershell scripting for staff support. The main production and development environment is Linux-based.
• As our principal mission is to serve scholarly and scientific research, also desirable, is a background that includes experience in social science or humanities research, or other text-based research.

If you have any questions, contact HRAF’s Vice President, Michael Fischer, at anthrowalla@gmail.com and copy to HRAF President Carol Ember at carol.ember@yale.edu