Are you a software developer who wants to play a big part in advancing leading-edge patient care, medical research, and education? The Galter Health Sciences Library & Learning Center (Galter) at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine in downtown Chicago is looking for a technically versatile, curious, and cooperative software developer to join our Digital Systems group. You will envision, create, and sustain infrastructure, applications, and services for our library website, catalog application, digital repositories, Raspberry Pi screens, and other information management systems. You will also have the opportunity to work on community-driven open source projects.  

The way we work represents the best of both academia and startup culture. You will be part of a leading research university and medical school while working on small, nimble teams using state of the art technologies and methodologies. We support continuing education, career development, as well as quality of life and flexibility.  

In this role, you will: 

• Maintain/improve. Create and maintain code documentation, identify/resolve system performance issues and make improvements. 
• Analyze. You’ll help gather requirements for projects, working with developers, librarians, and other team members to define them.  
• Design. Create workable models from requirements.  
• Build. You will partner with another developer to create complex and crucial components to our systems. You will focus on performance and reliability.  
• Collaborate. Work with developers and the library team to plan, scope, build, deploy, and maintain our tools and resources.  
• Code responsibly. You will minimize tech debt, test and monitor everything, advocate for change or investment as needed. Review other team member’s code. 
• Work on open-source projects as well as proprietary vendor-supplied systems. 
• Learn, have fun. Be part of a small team within a large, thriving academic community. 

Minimum Requirement: 

• Successful completion of a full 4-year course of study in an accredited college or university leading to a bachelor's or higher degree; OR appropriate combination of education and experience.  
• 2 year relevant experience required in designing, coding, testing, and debugging software. 
• Software development experience and proven track-record of delivery. 
• Polyglot programming skills. We work primarily with Ruby (Rails), JavaScript, PostreSQL, SOLR. We use Git for source control. Jenkins for CI. 

Preferred Qualifications: 

• Intellectual curiosity, self-motivation, compassion, creativity. You are not afraid to experiment. You are kind.  
• Commitment to engineering best practices. You write quality code, and don’t skip testing, peer code reviews, or collaboration.  
• Communication skills.  You know how to communicate technical ideas to non-technical people and are able to translate problems into technical solutions. You also know how to give/receive good news, bad news, suggestions and feedback. 
• System administration experience. You are comfortable in UNIX/Linux command line environments.  
• A degree in Computer Science/Computer Engineering (or commensurate experience). 
• Experience with the open source community. 
• Experience developing digital library and information management applications. 

If you are excited about this role, but you’re worried that you might not have enough experience, or exactly the right skills, please contact us anyway.