Senior Web Application Developer

Description

The Art Institute of Chicago is seeking a web application developer with a solid experience in front- and back-end building for a unique and exciting 2-year project.

The Art Institute of Chicago is developing a web application called OSCI (Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative). This is an open source, Drupal-based publishing system that allows scholars to access high quality images and bibliographical references in a document formatted like a printed catalog, with the advantages of interactive web technologies.

OSCI is a high-profile project and a ground-breaking technology in the field of scholarly research and publishing. Some beta catalogs have been already published online: http://publications.artic.edu

The ideal candidate will be responsible for delivering front- and back-end code within the Drupal framework making up the OSCI toolkit. He or she will provide technical and strategic expertise in planning and developing new features, debugging, maintaining, expanding and documenting the OSCI Toolkit code. Changes made to the source code will be committed to Github.

The candidate will also help integrating data into OSCI coming from CITI, our Collection Management System, and our Digital Asset Management System, which are accessed through REST and SOAP APIs.

The candidate might occasionally support other applications and RDBMS's that manage the Museum's data flow. Most of them are built in the PHP-based Yii framework and are backed by MySQL, PostgreSQL, Solr and MongoDB data sources.

This position reports to the Director of Application Services, Collections, and will work tightly with other 3 team members.

We are looking for an experienced developer able to grasp the complexity and diversity of the CITI ecosystem and deliver stable, secure, thoroughly tested and documented code for a high-profile, public-domain service.

A solid experience with PHP, Drupal, MySQL, HTML5, Javascript and CSS3 are primary requirements. Some experience with version control and collaboration with Git is also required. A portfolio of high-profile projects involving these technologies is highly desired.

We are not looking for a developer who just puts plug-ins together, but someone who understand the technology and utilizes at its best. Performance optimization, device portability and stability of the code are top priorities.

A developer with solid technical skills as well as ideas, who likes challenging and innovative projects and is committed to the Art Institute's vision, is our ideal candidate.

The candidate will expect to be working with a friendly, small team, with an excellent technical knowledge and an open mind to new ideas. He or she will enjoy a great work/life balance, generous perks, an office aquarium and a rewarding everyday experience.

About the Art Institute of Chicago

The Art Institute of Chicago collects, preserves, and interprets works of art of the highest quality, representing the world’s diverse artistic traditions, for the inspiration and education of the public and in accordance with our profession’s highest ethical standards and practices. Our permanent collection has grown from plaster casts to nearly 300,000 works of art in fields ranging from Chinese bronzes to contemporary design and from textiles to installation art. Together, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the museum of the Art Institute of Chicago are now internationally recognized as two of the leading fine-arts institutions in the United States. 

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