Software Engineer - 100% remote work!

Description

We are looking for a passionate, experienced software engineer to join our team. You will be focusing on improving and extending Ushahidi's open source tools, and developing custom solutions for clients.

You are a passionate developer with a few years of work experience and an entrepreneurial drive for international development and social justice. After hacking away at your own projects and/or busting your chops for a while in the corporate world and startups, you're looking to use your skills to develop software that has a tangible social good.

New cultures, people and experiences give you energy; you work effectively and efficiently on distributed teams with diverse experience across many time zones. Given the freedom to work anywhere, you are self-guided and can work autonomously with superior communication skills. Chaos gives you joy, order is your satisfaction.

About Ushahidi
Ushahidi is a crowdsourcing and data collection tool that helps communities, activists, companies, and humanitarian organizations gather and share critical information with the people that need it most. Ushahidi uses visualizations like maps and lists to help you understand what happened, when, and where.

The Ushahidi tech stack is in two parts: a RESTful API built using modern, object-oriented PHP; and a web client built using modern JS and SASS. On the backend, we use PHP components from Kohana, Aura, Symfony, and League, along with other smaller libraries. On the frontend, we use AngularJS and Bourbon, along with many other smaller libraries. Our development stack also includes phpspec, phpunit, Behat, Gulp, Browserify.

Requirements

Responsibilities

Working collaboratively with a team to build and iterate on the Ushahidi platform

Working across the full stack from API to frontend as needed

Practice sustainable coding (code reviews, automated tests, Git, comments)

What We're Looking For

Experience with some or all of our JS stack: AngularJS, Browserify, Leaflet and a bunch of smaller libraries

Experience with some or all of our PHP stack: Kohana, Aura, Symfony, and League, along with other smaller libraries

Willingness to help out where you're needed: responding to coworkers, helping a community members fix a bug, or working deep in the code

Drive for working with and supporting our clients and customers

Eagerness to take feedback, grow and further your skills

A passion for programming and open source

A practice of reading and writing in technical terms, following and leaving records of technical work

Bonus Points if you..

have used or deployed Ushahidi's tools

have experience working on an open source product

love using and building beautiful maps

have experience with mobile app development (Android, iOS or Cordova apps)

have experience with Ansible or other server automation tools

Used any of: NodeJS, MySQL, Nginx, Vagrant, PostgreSQL, Symfony, Laravel, JS app frameworks (Backbone, React, Ember, etc), Browserify

Why You Might Be A Good Fit

Independence. Ushahidi operates under a de facto system of commander's intent. That is, the team agrees upon a goal, but how it is accomplished is left largely up to everyone. Nobody will be leaning over your shoulder telling you what to do everyday, we expect you to be able to do that yourself.

Team oriented. Desire to work with and support other developers in the team. We rely on team members to support each other, review each others code, and generally help each other keep winning.

Intrinsically motivated. Ushahidi came from Nairobi, but team members work all around the world. If you need to come into an office and talk to your boss everyday to stay motivated, this job is not for you. If all you need is a crazy cool project, wifi, and coffee, then you'll fit right in.

Ability to get things done and ship. We'd love you to write beautiful elegant code every time but at crunch time: getting things done matters. You'll need to pick the right balance between doing it right and doing it fast.

Community driven. Desire to work with the community, dig into their use cases, and help them solve problems. Ushahidi has a large and dedicated community whose needs have evolved.

Why You Might Not Be A Good Fit

We pay competitively at Ushahidi, however, keep in mind that we are still a mission driven non-profit.

You only want to wear one hat. Ushahidi is growing (30+ employees) but we take on the goals of much larger organizations. In practice this means that all Ushahidians end up wearing multiple hats and working on multiple projects. If that excites you, great! If you are set on never venturing out of your job title, you're going to get frustrated fast.

You want to be in an office surrounded by colleagues. You will most likely be operating on your own unless you are based in Nairobi, where about half our team is based.

We strongly encourage people from traditionally underrepresented populations in tech - such as women, People of Color, People with Disabilities, and LGBTQ+ people, etc - to apply! We have a diverse team and we love it!

Benefits

Why Working At Ushahidi Is Awesome

Our goal in hiring is to find great people first, great skills second.

We generally don't care where you live. As long as you have Internet access, live wherever you want. Ushahidi team members currently live all over the world: from Japan and New Zealand, to Nairobi and San Francisco.

We don't care when you work. There are no "business hours" at Ushahidi, we are milestone based, not a sit-in-your-chair from 9 to 5 company.

Yearly company retreat. We work remote, but once a year we get the whole company together in one physical location to plan for the year ahead, as well as hang out and enjoy each others company.

Quality of life. Ushahidi attracts workaholics, so we all work hard to make sure everyone has a work-life balance.

Other benefits: Take what you want vacation policy (Minimum 25 days a year), parental leave, allowance for health insurance, allowance for a coworking space.