Drupal Maintenance and Release Developer

Description

About Born-Digital

Born-Digital, Inc. is a full-service open source digital repository developer specializing in two Drupal-based digital asset management systems: “Islandora” and “Archipelago.” We work with academic libraries, museums, galleries, and other cultural heritage organizations to make their collections available to the world.

Born-Digital Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Commitment Statement

Born-Digital will honor the experiences, perspectives, and unique identities of our employees, clients, and colleagues in the open-source digital repository community. We are passionate about creating and maintaining community and working environments that are inclusive, equitable, and welcoming. We are proud to build software that champions access and accessibility.

Position Overview

The Drupal Maintenance and Release Developer will work closely with Born-Digital’s Drupal developers, project managers, system administrators, and other operations staff to provide robust support for our Islandora 2.0 and Archipelago repositories, based in Drupal 9+. As a Drupal Maintenance and Release Developer, you will coordinate our Composer-based Drupal module management process, ensure our release workflows run smoothly and efficiently, and respond to emergent/incoming support requests as we expand to serve our clients in the cultural heritage sector.  We are looking for a Drupal developer who brings an understanding (or can demonstrate the ability to quickly learn) Composer, and who is mission-driven, passionate about quality, and motivated to deliver results in a fast-paced agency environment. 

This is a great opportunity for someone with a solid foundation in Drupal who is enthusiastic about release management, or with release management experience with a different platform. We’re open to bringing on the right candidate and providing on-the-job training.

Ideally we are looking for a full-time (we define full-time as 5 days a week, 8 hours a day including a 1-hour paid lunch), permanent hire. Born-Digital maintains an office in beautiful Western Massachusetts, but we welcome remote candidates who can work during local business hours (approximately 9am - 5pm EST).  Remote candidates from outside the USA are welcome to apply provided they can overlap with us and work synchronously during our core business hours; we regret that we cannot accommodate work visas. Very little if any travel will be required, although most of us do enjoy attending relevant conferences when travel is safe. We believe in maintaining a healthy work-life balance for our team, with options for flexible scheduling. While occasional night or weekend work may be necessary to handle an emergency, most of us work about 40 hours a week.

Responsibilities

• Release Management lifecycle:

  • Plan, coordinate, and deploy code releases as per our schedules

  • Execute the technical aspects of release management for all of Born-Digital’s own modules, base theme, and additional infrastructure configuration (Docker images, Docker Compose configuration, CICD configuration, and other DevOps tooling)

  • Complete all testing at the validation stage and deployment stage

  • Confidently troubleshoot releases and research issues to resolve problems, bugs, and blockers

  • Maintain a high degree of communication and provide timely updates to the team/clients

  • Support the creation of documentation related to procedures on build and release, notifications, and dependencies

  • Help us define the strategic usage of release management tools to continuously consider our current practices and how they could be improved

• Drupal maintenance management for over two dozen Drupal 9 websites, with expectations of continued growth:

  • Deploy Drupal core and module updates on all Composer-managed Drupal sites according to a regular schedule (usually monthly)

  • Review updated sites in pre-production environments and remediate as necessary on the same regular schedule

  • Provide ongoing collaboration with the team to determine process improvements and efficient practices as we scale out and up; test, document, and implement new practices

• Drupal Software Development:

  • Respond to emergent client site issues and triage incoming requests via our ticketing system

  • Test your own code locally/independently against acceptance criteria, and coordinate with team members on deployments and remote testing

  • Contribute to software development sprint cycles as time allows

• Team Expectations:

  • Effectively collaborate and communicate with both stakeholders and teammates to achieve success; this includes participation in client meetings, sprint and project retrospectives, and regular operations/production meetings, as required

  • Maintain an active knowledge of the relevant tools, trends, and technologies 

Required Skills and Experience

General:

• The ability (and eagerness) to learn new skills on the job

• You should be able to demonstrate that you can collaborate successfully as part of a team (ideally in an Agile environment), including being comfortable engaging with our clients and stakeholders in relevant  open-source platform communities.

• We’re looking for someone with excellent communication skills, including:

  • The ability to clearly and concisely convey (and understand) technical information both in writing and verbally

  • Writing documentation for both internal and external (client) use

  • The ability to read and follow detailed requirements and specifications

Technical:

• Our ideal candidate will bring at least two years of experience in the following areas:

  • Building/releasing complex software stacks and release/branch management

  • Working with Composer or similar dependency management tools (NPM, Maven/Gradle, etc.)

  • Working with Git tools in a team environment

  • Writing durable code for Drupal 8/9

  • Excellent understanding of Drupal 9+ ecosystem

  • Writing code according to a technical spec and/or prototype

  • Writing consistent, standards-compliant PHP 7+ and HTML

  • Ability to successfully test one’s own code before handing off to other team members for further review

• Demonstrated knowledge of CI/CD & DevOps culture

• Demonstrated ability to support production schedules and manage multiple tasks with overlapping deadlines and thrive in a multi-project, multi-environment software development process

• Facility with QA/QC workflows and debugging systems and software on the fly

• Comfortable using Linux/Unix terminals 

Desired Skills and Experience

While the following skills and experience aren’t required, we are especially interested in candidates with some or all of these, or who express an interest in learning them on the job:

• Knowledge of cloud projects and cloud delivery

• Solid understanding of server tools and concepts (e.g., python, databases, web performance) and familiarity with cloud infrastructure (e.g., AWS).

• Knowledge of and experience working with digital asset management and repository systems, especially Islandora and Fedora

  • Familiarity with and experience working with a range of metadata standards/ontologies such as Dublin Core, MARCXML, MODS, Schema.org, etc.

  • Knowledge of metadata harvesting protocols like OAI-PMH, OAI-ORE, JSON API, IIIF Collection, and Search APIs 

  • Familiarity with Linked Data concepts, especially re: cultural heritage

  • Knowledge of and experience working with Linked Data technologies such as RDF and JSON-LD, and querying languages like SPARQL

  • Experience working with scripting languages and/or tools for metadata manipulation and transformation (e.g., OpenRefine, Python, XSLT, etc.)

Benefits and Compensation:

This position supports fully remote, hybrid, or in-person work. Our team works together from across the United States and Canada, with several of us located in Western Massachusetts who come into the office on a regular basis. Remote-only candidates must be able to overlap with the majority of our local working hours of 9am to 5pm Eastern Time.

• Holidays and Vacation: 11 company holidays plus the extra days between Christmas and New Year’s Day off, plus 4 weeks of paid vacation

• Retirement: 100% 401k match up on contributions to 3% of salary; 50% of contributions 3.01-5% of salary

• Health Plan: Aetna Health Insurance plans offered via our PPO, Justworks. Employer contributions of $300-500/mo depending upon plan

• Ancillary Benefits: Free short- and long-term disability, as well as free life insurance up to 1x salary, capped at $100k

• Flexible Scheduling:  We value a healthy work-life balance and support a flexible approach to daily work schedules