North Highland’s Philadelphia-based, public sector client is currently seeking Backend Software Developer for a long-term contract assignment. As a Backend Software Developer in the
Office of Open Data & Digital Transformation, you'll work closely with other members of ODDT (specialists in design, data, engineering, and content) to develop new web applications and the infrastructure to support them. You’ll join a city government that has the largest GitHub organization among cities (github.com/CityOfPhiladelphia), work in the open, and leverage open source tools and cloud infrastructure to improve the experience of interacting with city government online.
Work activities
- Be a part of the conversations that determine how and when to address the needs of users and department stakeholders through platform features on beta.phila.gov
- Develop web applications and the infrastructure to support them
- Help support the cloud infrastructure that hosts beta.phila.gov, including troubleshooting issues or outages outside of business hours when necessary (this is rare and you’ll share this responsibility).
- Work with the team to enhance the infrastructure for beta.phila.gov to support its graduation to phila.gov
- Work closely with other developers to improve deployment and development workflow
- Help manage the transition of beta.phila.gov to phila.gov
- Develop and help support ETL/data automation pipelines
Skills/experience REQUIRED of the assigned staff
- Adaptable. Perhaps you’ll need to augment a tool with bash when you really want to rewrite it in Python, but we’ve got more pressing priorities. Or perhaps timelines shift and we have to cut features from a release. We expect you’ll be able to professionally deal with changing environments.
- Self-directed. Given broad direction, you can prioritize your work and allocate your time and resources effectively. Just as important, you know when to ask for help and aren’t afraid to do so.
- Systems-thinker. You can envision how a particular feature may affect other, unrelated parts of the project.
- Excellent communicator. You can communicate technical nuances in plain language with partners of varying technical background and write documentation clearly enough that someone who’s never met you could use it.
- Initiative taker. You take action to improve a situation without waiting for explicit instructions, and you seek new and improved techniques/technology to work better.
- Collaborative. You recognize the importance of other people being able to work with what you create - and wanting to, and avoid building in a silo.
Knowledge of
- Server-side programming languages such as PHP, Python, or Node.js
- Shell scripting languages like Bash
- Linux security concerns and ways to mitigate
- themGit, or similar version control systems