About this role
Overview The New York Public Library is seeking a Software Engineer III to join our Digital Asset Preservation and Access (DAPA) team, where they will have a major impact on NYPL’s ability to make more of its extensive collections available online. This includes assets available on NYPL’s Digital Collections site, as well other discovery platforms, staff management tools and the systems that support them. This will involve major contributions to an ongoing initiative to modernize the systems that provide access to these collections, and from there continue to expand them in collaboration with our partners in NYPL’s Research libraries.
This strategic work will underlie much of NYPL’s objectives in this area, and is an exciting opportunity for an engineer to identify improvements that will impact all of our patrons. Some early goals will include building new OCR processes for better search, improving the stability of vital data pipelines and designing new methods of delivering high resolution images to patrons. To deliver these strategic priorities, we are seeking an engineer who can help us proactively improve our engineering practices generally, develop solutions to longstanding engineering problems (and deploy them), and be an advocate for change on the team.
As NYPL’s engineering teams have grown recently we are also looking for a candidate who is interested in collaborating with a wide range of partners to both learn about practices across the library and teach others about our work on DAPA. In all this is an exciting opportunity for an engineer to join an already successful team and help bring it to the next level.
- Some expectations for this role are that within: 1 month , this person will: Complete software development tasks collaboratively in accordance with our engineering workflows Begin to understand the product requirements for our DAM systems and how they connect to larger strategic objectives Review code and provide feedback during code reviews Develop and execute unit tests for own/team’s code to ensure accuracy, reliability and robustness 3 months , this person will: Develop an understanding of our DAM infrastructure, systems and the challenges facing them Contribute to new projects and open issues, ensuring that implementation is completed in a maintainable, observable and testable manner Own your project’s technical decisions that will impact the team and organization, especially around streamlining asset and metadata flows Take ownership of existing systems 6 months Consistently contribute to code bases and understand repositories across NYPL Digital Participate in design and architecture discussions and demonstrate an ability to abstract problems into general solutions Develop and maintain scripts to automate testing processes 12 months and beyond , this person will: Own significant components of NYPL’s DAM ecosystem, including their design, implementation and maintenance Participate in department-wide initiatives, such as the adoption of new testing frameworks, etc Work well without strong support structures, either between teams or without one Provide guidance to more junior software engineers regarding applications they own as well as on best practices in general Collaborate with Engineering leadership on overall direction of team/project Responsibilities Understand project needs and how to implement specific technical solution Take ownership of specific systems and ensure their maintenance/support Partner with other engineers to design new software systems and improve existing ones Collaborate with Senior Engineers to help realize new projects Build software following industry best practices and NYPL values ( https://github.com/NYPL/engineering-general ) Contribute to test suites to ensure the creation of accurate, reliable, and robust code Create technical documentation and specifications for all delivered code Understand how to identify and remediate tech debt Identify and resolve ambiguities/issues with requirements for team and org-wide projects Provide actionable feedback during code reviews Assume additional responsibilities as required by the organization Required Education and Certifications Bachelor’s Degree - OR - 4+ years of experience developing software applications at scale Required Experience Equivalent 4 years hands-on development experience on relevant tech stack 3-5 years in backend development Required Skills 3+ years in back-end application development in Python or Ruby Proficiency with one or more Python web frameworks (Flask, Django, etc.) Strong experience in SQL and relational databases such as mySQL, Postgres, etc.
Proficiency with version control systems and git Experience with CI/CD tools, especially GitHub Actions Strong working experience with other languages (PHP or Java preferred) Familiarity with agile methodologies such as Scrum & Kanban Familiarity with a major cloud computing platform, especially AWS Managerial/Supervisory Responsibilities N/A