Would you be interested in a job where you can do your part to make the world a better place? A job where you can apply your skills and creativity to make the world’s cultural heritage more accessible? Would you be interested in a work environment based on collaboration and lifelong learning? An environment where you and your team move with purpose and preserve things? If so, then we may be a good fit for you.

The UCLA Library is currently recruiting for a Lead Applications Developer. This position will serve as a technical lead and mentor and help us improve the performance, maintainability, usability, and accessibility of the Library’s online interfaces as we embark on a complete overhaul of our entire web presence.

We strongly encourage candidates from underrepresented genders, races, and ethnicities to apply. As a library and archive, our mission is to provide access to cultural heritage and scholarly materials from a wide variety of cultures and perspectives. We are striving to create a team and a workplace that is anti-racist and anti-sexist and reflects our commitment to that mission. Please see both the Library’s statement [1] and the campus initiatives [2] on equity, diversity, and inclusion.

We also welcome candidates from outside the Los Angeles area. All our positions can be performed remotely. We have several permanently remote members on the team already.

About the Position

The Lead Applications Developer will lead the development of web applications and sites, ensure that the code meets both functional and non-functional requirements (especially maintainability and evolvability), coordinate architectural designs with the unit Head and the Lead Services Developer, and mentor other members of the Applications Team. You can see more details in the job posting here: http://hr.mycareer.ucla.edu/applicants/Central?quickFind=80229

About the Team

The Software Development & Library Systems unit is comprised of 11 Software Developers (one position vacant), 3 Sysadmins, and 1 UX Designer (position vacant), who are grouped into four development teams:

1) the Applications Team, which builds end-user applications,

2) the Services Team, which builds backend services and APIs used by internal and external applications,

3) the Systems Team, which manages COTS systems and builds business applications and middleware, and

4) the Labs Team, which works on machine learning and data science projects.

In addition to the four development teams, the unit also includes the Dev Support Team (systems administrators) and the UX Team. Members from those two groups are embedded in the four development teams so that we all have a shared set of goals and processes.

How We Operate

The unit follows a Kanban method of Agile development, wherein each team meets weekly for backlog grooming and the entire unit meets for daily standups and monthly retrospectives.

The unit strives for a DevOps culture of collaboration, feedback & improvement, and continual learning. Evidence of this culture includes: active stakeholders participating in backlog grooming and standups, regular monitoring of retrospective action items, and dedicated time on Fridays for individual learning and experimentation.

The team also embraces a remote-first culture, and has done so for many years. We have permanently remote members across 4 time zones, and several more who work remotely 1-3 days per week (during the pandemic everyone has been fully remote).

About the Projects and Products

We recently completed a year-long effort of user research and design, resulting in the creation of a Design System, which we have just begun using to rebuild the main UCLA Library website and the website of the UCLA Film & Television Archive. We will bring all our various collection platforms into the main website codebase so that our students and faculty have a better user experience: one interface, one codebase, for all things provided by the Library.

Over the past 20 years the Library has made over 3 million items (~235 Petabytes) of cultural heritage materials available online in various platforms. Some of these collections come from the Library’s own holdings, such as those found in the UCLA Digital Collections [3] and Picturing UCLA [4]. Many more materials come from a wide variety of partners, including other groups on campus, regional and national collaborators, and cultural heritage organizations from around the globe. To get a taste of the variety of cultures from which our partners and their materials come from, take a look at some of our recent collaborations, including the Frontera Project [5], the International Digital Ephemera Project [6], the Modern Endangered Archives Project [7], and the Sinai Manuscripts Project [8].

In addition to the projects described above, the team will also begin collaborating with our new colleagues from the UCLA Film & Television Archive, which came under the wing of the UCLA Library as part of a reorganization in the Fall of 2019. The Archive contains one of the largest film collections in the country, second only to the Library of Congress. A large amount of film has been digitized but is not yet available online, and a much larger amount is yet to be digitized. Over the coming years we hope to make as much of this material available online as possible.

About the Technology

The collections described above are each housed in platforms built with different tech stacks by different groups of people. Name a tech stack, and we’ve probably got it: Ruby on Rails, Drupal, React, JRun, ColdFusion, and more. Our vision is to build a single collections interface into the main Library website and migrate all content into a new repository. We will still have multiple systems of record and a suite of services in the backend, but there will be just one interface for our users and just one frontend codebase to maintain.

Our preferred tech stack going forward includes Vue.js + Nuxt.js with StoryBook for the frontend, PostgreSQL and ElasticSearch for data storage and indexing, microservices built with Vert.x (Java), and a variety of backend repositories and content management systems, most notably including: Craft, LibCal, Primo, Dataverse, and ArchiveSpace. Our infrastructure is a mix of on-prem (VMWare, Kubernetes, Rancher) and cloud-based (AWS, Netlify) tools.

Salary

The salary scale for the position is $5,692 - $14,925 monthly.

Location

The Digital Initiatives and Information Technology department currently operates primarily in two buildings, Powell Library and Young Research Library, on the UCLA campus in Westwood (Los Angeles). We now have members of the department also working from the Packard Humanities Institute in Santa Clarita (about an hour’s drive north), where the Film & Television Archive’s collections are housed.

However, we have several members of the team who are permanently remote, including members as far away as Alaska and North Carolina. We have been operating in a remote-first manner for several years and welcome candidates from outside the Los Angeles area.

Links

[1] https://www.library.ucla.edu/lead-equity-diversity-inclusion

[2] https://equity.ucla.edu/edi-ucla/

[3] https://digital.library.ucla.edu

[4] https://picturingucla.library.ucla.edu/

[5] http://frontera.library.ucla.edu/

[6] https://idep.library.ucla.edu/

[7] https://meap.library.ucla.edu/

[8] https://sinaimanuscripts.library.ucla.edu/