Overview

NYPL Digital is the department responsible for the digital transformation of the Library in order to facilitate the successful transition to the delivery of core patron-facing services through digital platforms. This role will help pave the way for the ethical and sustainable use of digital technologies in society and provide a sustainable approach to technology.

The successful candidate will lead and have a significant impact on a small but dedicated cross-functional team to iteratively develop innovative products for the library.  This is a two year grant funded role.

You’ll have the opportunity to architect and implement our product and technical strategy. If you have experience in Ruby and/or Node.js and an interest in microservices, event-driven / serverless architectures, complex data structures, and graph databases, this is a unique opportunity to work on projects that will transform the way patrons interact with the Library.

Our expectations for this person are that within…

1 month, this person will:

• Quickly acclimate to the Library’s infrastructure, environments and deployment practices
• Delegate and execute software development tasks, as directed by the Director of Digital Technology or the Team Lead, in line with our engineering workflows
• Get to know and start to build cooperative relationships with their team; assess and communicate personal development plans and goals with team members

3 months, this person will:

• Gain an understanding of NYPL’s engineering processes, products and visions.
• Moderate design and architecture discussions within their team, and make decisions on issues that affect their entire team.

6 months, this person will:

• Solicit, institute and maintain new best practices across their team.
• Identify and remove duplicated or wasted effort across projects
• Research and propose new technologies

12 months and beyond, this person will:

• Guide their team members towards improvement and professional development.
• Define & promote DevOps practices & demonstrate awareness of systems challenges & ensure smooth running of services.
• Recognize and reward team members for outstanding procedures, behaviors, and practices; identify poor team performance and coach & counsel as required.

Principal Responsibilities

Reporting to the Director, Digital Technology, the Senior Software Engineer will:

• Manage a team of software engineers, including task planning and code reviews.
• Drive technical projects and provide leadership in an innovative and fast-paced environment.
• Take responsibility for the overall planning, execution and success of complex technical projects.
• Contribute technically to projects.
• Contribute to strategic and tactical product planning.
• Work closely with the product management team to ensure we’re building the best products.
• Tackle the complex and interesting challenge of solving business problems through software engineering.
• Hold your own in technical discussion, be a subject matter expert, and have strategic influence
• Communicate cross-functionally and drive engineering efforts

Required Education & Experience

• Bachelor’s Degree or certificate from specialized coding program
• 3 years of hands-on technical leadership and people management experience.
• 5 or more years of hands-on web development experience on relevant tech stac

Minimum Qualifications

• Strong experience building web applications in Ruby, PHP, Python or Java using a framework such as Rails, Symfony, Spring, etc. Understanding of front-end frameworks such as React is beneficial..
• A proven track record of managing, developing, and mentoring software engineering teams.
• Experience with Agile software development, for example Scrum or Kanban
• Experience doing hands-on large scale software development and architecture

Preferred Qualifications

• 10 years of relevant industry experience, with 5 years of hands-on technical leadership and people management experience (managing teams of 2 or more developers).
• Experience with cloud platforms (e.g. AWS)
• Experience with search technologies (e.g. Solr, Elasticsearch)
• Experience with event-driven architectures.
• Familiarity with CMS like Drupal is beneficial.
• Experience with design systems (Carbon, USWeb, etc) is beneficial.

All team members are expected and encouraged to embody the NYPL Core Values:

• Be Helpful to patrons and colleagues
• Be Resourceful in solving problems 
• Be Curious in all aspects of your work

Work Environment

Office Environment

Physical Duties

• Limited physical effort is required
• May require travel within NYC

Hours

Monday – Friday 9-5