Director of Engineering Full-time

The Director of Engineering serves a mission-critical role at the Permanent Legacy Foundation. The candidate filling this position will be trusted with defining and achieving the technical requirements that ensure reliable data preservation and access for current and future users. They will become an expert in the field of digital preservation.

The Director of Engineering will provide ultimate technical leadership for the Permanent Legacy Foundation. They will be responsible for maintaining the integrity of the Permanent.org application technical stack, system architecture, open source codebase, public API, development processes, data security and engineering policy.

They will manage a growing internal team of engineers and outside contractors that execute front-end, back-end, and mobile development responsibilities. They will report to the Executive Director and work with them to align engineering priorities with organizational growth goals.

Specifically, the Director of Engineering will:

• Coordinate all engineers at Permanent and OTS as one team working together to achieve mutually determined engineering team objectives and track accountability and progress via key results (OKRs);
• Focus the engineering team on improving robustness of the codebase, increasing modularity and test coverage, and fixing data reliability bugs;
• Contribute to software development by writing code, reviewing pull requests, resolving issues, and developing tests;
• Evaluate Permanent’s public Application Programming Interface (API) for deployment, internal reliance, and publication. Identify and achieve reasonable API development goals for partner companies and organizations.
• Evaluate Permanent’s systems and architecture for continuous iterative improvements;
• Help further develop the technical skills and collaboration process skills of existing Permanent engineering staff;
• Clearly establish, encourage, monitor, and modernize engineering policy and procedures so the team can efficiently produce robust software and benefit from open source engagement;
• Direct deployments and releases, including documenting and improving the deployment and release procedures;
• Direct grant funded technology development projects, ex. our recently confirmed project with Grant for the Web;
• Direct technology partnerships, ex. our co-development partnership with Open Tech Strategies;

The Permanent office is located in Austin but Permanent staff work remotely most of the time under flexible, full time schedules. Preference will be given to candidates colocated in the Austin region and able to commute into the office for twice weekly team meetings (note: at present, Permanent is practicing full time remote work during the pandemic). However, full consideration will be given to remote work candidates located within 3 hours of U.S. Central time zone provided they will be actively present during normal weekday working hours, available with reasonable notice, and able to attend scheduled video meetings with their colleagues without hinderance.

The ideal candidate for Director of Engineering at Permanent:

• has at least ten years of experience in software development (counting both programming and management roles);
• has experience leading a small, tight-knit programming team;
• is experienced in setting team culture and sets high expectations through leading by example (e.g., in code review, in ensuring test coverage, etc);
• is a competent programmer familiar with modern PHP, Javascript, and Python;
• has led development, deployment, monitoring, and maintenance of a modern web application with an active user base;
• has played a significant or sustained role in one or more open source projects, and is familiar with open source collaboration practices;
• has experience aligning engineering goals with organizational strategy goals;
• has strong written and spoken communications skills;
• is proficient at working remotely utilizing synchronous and asynchronous communication tools.

Benefits

• Health Care Plan (Medical, Dental & Vision)
• Paid Time Off (Vacation, Sick & Public Holidays)
• Work From Home
• Wellness Resources

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