Python Software Developer

Worldwide  ‐ Onsite
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Description

To support our growing portfolio of open source and open data projects, we're looking for two developers to join the team who can:

- Work as part of the development team to deliver both stable products and rapid prototypes for our partners, and to support key open data standards;
- Help keep the servers for existing projects up and running, and get involved in planning, deploying and testing new code;
- Get involved in the wider work of the co-operative, supporting communities and organisations across the world to understand open data, to publish data using open standards, and to reuse data in accessible, user-centred tools and services.
- We have a strong commitment to free and open source software, rooted in our co-operative ethics.

A great candidate will be:

- Ready to hit the ground running - familiar with many of the technologies we already use, and ready to learn the others. An understanding of the open data landscape and data standards will be helpful, as well experience working on small-to-medium sized collaborative software projects.
- Proactive, motivated and engaged - ready to work independently and as part of a team, prioritising and managing a varied workload, and committed to working on short and long-term projects with a social impact.
- We're a distributed team, so you will mostly be remote working, with opportunities to travel locally and internationally to work with partners, and for regular team meetings and co-working.
- A lifelong learner excited about the opportunity to be part of building a new cooperative, working in a rapidly developing field, and building on and contributing to emerging open technologies.

If this sounds like you - read on and apply.

job specification: responsibilities (developer) The core of this role will involve developing and maintaining software services that work with open datasets in a range of formats: supporting standardisation and accessibility of data for a wide range of users. You will also get involved in a number of short-term research and development projects: where we help partners to understand the potential of open data through workshops, collaborative work and code.

On a day-to-day basis you will be:

- Writing code;
- Deploying software to live, staging and development environments;
- Reporting and responding to issues and fixing bugs;
- Contributing to software development roadmaps;
- Working on updates to data standards and schema;
- Prioritising feature development;
- Monitoring the use of software, using a variety of tools;
- Monitoring the availability of software services on our servers;
- Updating/Upgrading software dependencies;
- Clarifying tasks within the team and with clients;
- Attending daily stand up meetings to prioritise work for the day;
- Contributing to team meetings and the growth of the Co-operative;

Some of the main technologies we currently work with include:

- Programming language & frameworks: Python including Django; Bash scripts; Javascript.
- Version control: Git
- Hosting: Linux (Ubuntu); SaltStack; Apache; Server monitoring with Icinga (nagios fork); Docker
- Testing and Continuous Integration: py.test, selenium and Travis CI
- Data formats: JSON, Spreadsheets (including CSV), XML, Linked Data (RDF)
- Database technologies: Relational databases behind Django's ORM; Virtuoso (Triple store with SPARQL)
- Documentation formats: Markdown; ReStructuredText

Requirements

We recognise that there are many paths to becoming a competent software developer. We are more interested in demonstrable skills and experience, than qualifications, but if you have them we'd like to hear about them.

You will be joining a team whose backgrounds include physics, philosophy and youth work qualifications. We recognise the value that diverse backgrounds and experience bring to the co-operative.

With that in mind, we're looking for the following essential skills, knowledge and experience:

- Front-end and back-end web development, including MVC;
- Experience of developing in Python;
- The ability to rapidly learn new tools and technology;
- Knowledge/experience of data manipulation and management;
- Use of version control tools to manage collaborative development;
- Understanding of open source;
- Ability to work as part of a diverse team of developers and non-developers, and to work directly with clients;
- Strong communication skills;

Desirable skills and experience:

- Experience working with a large number of the current technologies we work with;
- Experience of working with or providing APIs and/or working with a data standard;
- Experience of software testing and deployment and systems administration;
- Experience of communicating with software users about bugs, upgrades, changes to code;
- Experience with multiple programming languages;
- Prior knowledge of the open data movement and community and/or understanding of open source software and content licensing;
- A demonstrated commitment to cooperative values;

We're also interested in the 'wildcard' skills and experience you might bring to the team.

About the Company

Open Data Services is a new workers co-operative. We deliver sustainable support for world-changing open data projects, including the Open Contracting Data Standard, 360Giving open philanthropy initiative, and ResourceProjects.org.

We're building an interdisciplinary team, combining developers, analysts and researchers to create tools and services that help organisations publish and use open data for social change.

We set-up Open Data Services in March 2015 to provide sustainable support to organisations and projects using data for social change. The founding members of the co-operative are Tim Davies, Steven Flower, David Carpenter and Ben Webb.

Between us, in the past we've led the development of global research programmes on open data, we've developed digital platforms for community information in the UK, and have supported the roll-out of the International Aid Transparency Initiative standard.
Start date
ASAP
From
Open Data Services Co-operative
Published at
09.09.2015
Contact person:
Freelancer Map
Project ID:
981380
Contract type
Freelance
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