Description
Do you enjoy working in any of Ruby, Python, Perl or JavaScript? Are you looking for smart colleagues, meaningful projects, and fresh technology challenges? Do you want to work from a place that suits you - and not be forced to commute to the middle of London? mySociety is a community of coders and technology fiends using our talents to make the world a better place.
We do this by building useful, high impact, democratic open source web apps like FixMyStreet, WhatDoTheyKnow.com and TheyWorkForYou.com, and running projects, such as Alaveteli, to help people run tools like these around the world.
We’re hiring open-source-savvy web developers in order to grow our international impact, help us sustain ourselves through commercial work, and increase our reach in the UK. No recruiters or agencies, please.
Why you should work with us
We are a friendly, user-focused software development team, and we get to work on stuff that matters. Our sites and projects help people to get important things done: holding politicians to account, extracting information from government, and getting streetlights fixed. And as a mySociety developer you can see the benefits and talk to the users, every day.
We’re looking for new developers who will be comfortable working on both charitable and commercial projects, for clients who vary from volunteers (asking for new features) through to big media company clients with high expectations of professionalism.
We’re not dogmatic about languages: if you can work in any of Ruby, Python or Perl you’ll be at home here - we’ll find an interesting project for you. We love Django and Rails, and we’re having fun experimenting with Node.js, canvas, and more.
We’re widely geographically dispersed, and a lot of people work from home or from co-working spaces. There is a high expectation of self-direction and self-discipline; our project management style aims to minimize pain and distraction, and leave people to get on with doing great work, normally in small groups.
You’ll also be collaborating with some amazing volunteers who are incredibly skilled and dedicated in their own right. Being part of mySociety means being in the kind of organisation that is so motivated that the management’s job is often to tell people to take it easy. We welcome people who, deep down, burn to make a difference.
Here’s the minimum skills we need you to have:
- You’ll need to be able to program in one or more of PHP, Python, Ruby or Perl.
- Experience in working with open source databases (such as PostgreSQL or MySQL).
- The ability to write clean, maintainable front end HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
- A pragmatic approach to automated testing.
Experience:
- You should have autonomously conceived, designed and built at least one interactive website or app of some kind, running it for extended periods.
- It would also help if you have maintained open source tools that are re-used by others.
As a person, we hope you will be:
- Friendly and motivated.
- Creative and lateral-thinking.
- Keen to learn and master new developments in technology, but able to weigh them against proven tools.
- Able to balance technical pragmatism and technical purism.
- Good at managing your own time and avoiding distractions.
- Aware and realistic about your own strengths and weaknesses.
- The sort of person who has passions beyond coding.
Salary:
£35-47k