Engineering positions at The GovLab, Brooklyn
The Governance Lab (www.thegovlab.org) aims to improve our lives and communities by changing how we govern using new technology. We work on high impact, multi-disciplinary projects with partners in city, state, and national governments and other public interest organizations and institutions in the United States and around the world.
To fulfill GovLab’s mission, our product & engineering team works along three axes:
- GovLab Projects. These are tools that help institutions govern differently and better, e.g. expert networks.
- Internal tools and websites for GovLab (but also others to use) with a focus on knowledge management, online education and data science & visualization.
- Foundational tools to empower civic innovators with their work, e.g. annotation framework, data gathering
- Designing and building an expert network to connect governance innovators within and across seven countries and cities;
- Creating civic tech expert systems;
- Developing an online education platform to run high impact courses for civic innovators;
- Developing an open innovation platform to help a major research university open up and democratize how it governs;
- Analyzing data flows in the criminal justice system to find opportunities for data sharing to decrease incarceration and crime;
- Developing the user experience to help a Latin American city crowdsource innovative solutions to public problems with its residents;
- Developing an interactive map of internet governance issues.
As our name suggests, we are in the business of experimentation and are looking for those who want to build software that is optimized for change. We believe in rough consensus, running code and co-creating products with our users through frequent iteration.
The technology stack(s) we use reflects this philosophy. We are seeking full-stack web developers to join a multidisciplinary team that includes engineers, economists, policy and legal experts, and designers.
Responsibilities includes
- develop quick proof of concepts for prototype testing and iteration
- deploy interactive and data-driven web content and dashboard
- provide data science solutions including scraping, cleaning and visualization
- work closely with product and design teams to define feature specifications
Requirements
- Passionate for civic tech, open government, open data
- B.S. or M.S. Computer Science, data science, or related field
- 3+ years of software development experience with a proven track record
- Excellent problem solving, critical thinking and communication skills
- Knowledge of Python
- Knowledge of SQL and Postgres
- Knowledge of web technologies including XHTML, CSS, JavaScript and jQuery
- Knowledge of iPython notebook, D3 and scikit-learn a plus
- Knowledge of cloud deployment tools – Docker, Ansible, etc. – and DevOps expertise a plus
