Open Syllabus Project | Web Applications Developer (Python and Javascript) | Full-time | NYC or Remote
The Open Syllabus Project is an academic data mining project based at Columbia University that's analyzing a corpus of 1M+ college course syllabi. We launched a beta version of the project with an op-ed in the New York Times last year [1].  Since then the project has appeared in Nature, Time, The Washington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education, MarketWatch, Der Spiegel, Business Insider, Lifehacker, FiveThirtyEight, WNYC, QZ, and elsewhere. It's also been picked up by major news outlets in Europe, Russia, China, Japan, South Korea, Ukraine, Egypt, and Mexico. With new funding from the Sloan, Hewlett, and Templeton foundations, we're working towards second release of the project that will feature much larger collections of syllabi, books, authors, institutions, and publishers.
<a href="
We're hiring a full-stack web applications developer to take a leading role in the development of these public-facing web services. We're looking for a developer who has significant experience at both layers of the web stack - someone who enjoys building large, stateful Javascript applications, and also is able to build and maintain the server-side APIs that feed these client applications.
PROJECTS
- Build a API in Python (Flask or Django) that organizes the results of the metadata extraction pipeline into web-facing data stores (Elasticsearch, Postgres) and exposes well-structured REST endpoints for the client application.
- Build a front-end application using React and Redux / MobX that surfaces the data on the web.
- Work with the data engineering team to define data requirements for the front end application.
QUALIFICATIONS
- 3+ years of professional experience in software engineering.
- Demonstrated ability to build high-quality, fast web applications that serve sizable traffic.
- Experience building large, stateful Javascript applications with React and React-ecosystem libraries like Redux and MobX.
- Experience with modern Javascript build tools like Webpack or Gulp.
- Experience with server-side Python development with Flask or Django.
- Commitment to sustainable engineering practices - automated testing and deployment, continuous integration, and reproducible development environments.
- An eye for clean, readable, extensible, well-tested code.
- Experience with remote / distributed collaboration on GitHub.
Drop us a line at REDACTED_EMAIL.
[1] <a href="