Center for International Development at Harvard University | Backend / Data Specialist | Cambridge, MA (Boston) | Full Time ONSITE
You: Want to make a positive impact in the world. You are interested in the intersection of data science and software engineering. You enjoy tinkering, working on and learning a wide variety of new things. Junior applicants encouraged, you'll have plenty of opportunity to learn on the job.
Us: A research center (<a href=") that focuses on the question: “Why do some countries grow while others don’t?”, and studies issues of economic development and poverty in developing countries. We have people from a wide set of backgrounds, including economics, public policy, computer science, mathematics. My team is a is a small software team within the larger organization.
Yesterday we just re-launched our free tool that helps people explore detailed world trade data and the productive capabilities of countries: (<a href="). We've also worked with many country governments, bringing in our policy and software expertise to assist them in their efforts (e.g. Colombia: <a href=" but also Mexico, Peru). We also occasionally do more experimental projects, like the 3D globe (<a href=").
Responsibilities:
- Learn and work alongside our backend/data engineer and our frontend engineer to build and improve backend APIs that query and deliver data quickly and efficiently for our data visualization tools
- Help deploy and manage server systems that host our data visualization tools
- Contribute to the build of data pipelines to clean, process and analyze large and varied datasets
- Help solve a wide variety of everyday technology issues, encountered by researchers (i.e. scraping data, extracting text from images, visualizing large datasets)
- Work with our product manager, developers, designer and users across the full software lifecycle: requirements, design, development, releasing and maintenance
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Basic Qualifications:
- Bachelor's degree and 1 year of demonstrated hands-on experience OR a high school diploma and 2 years of demonstrated hands-on experience. (Experience through previous employment positions, internships, or practicums, with the following (in order of preference):
- Web backend development (flask / Django / similar preferred)
- Data cleaning and analysis tools (pandas preferred)
- Experience with the linux command line
- Familiar with git and workflows for collaboration (GitFlow, Github Flow or similar)
- Experience working within an agile software development cycle
Here are the full details: <a href="
Contact: cidatlas [at] hks [dot] harvard [dot] edu , preferably with work samples that demonstrate best practices