Intermediate Developer

Intermediate Developer on Ushahidi Platform
TELECOMMUTE 
• Nairobi, Nairobi Municipality, Kenya • Platform

DESCRIPTION:

This is a 100% remote position.

We are looking for a passionate, experienced software engineer to be part of Ushahidi’s Platform team. As part of the team you will be focusing on building, launching and iterating on the latest version of the Ushahidi Platform.

You are a passionate developer with a few years of work experience and an entrepreneurial drive for international develop and social justice. After hacking away at your own projects and/or busting your chops for a while in the corporate world and startups, you’re looking to use your skills to develop software that has a tangible social good.
New cultures, people and experiences give you energy; you work effectively and efficiently on distributed teams with diverse experience across many time zones. Given the freedom to work anywhere, you are self-guided and can work autonomously with superior communication skills. Chaos gives you joy, order is your satisfaction.

About Ushahidi Platform:

Ushahidi Platform is an open source tool for collecting, curating and visualizing information from many channels to help you make smarter faster decisions. We help change makers to increase transparency, amplify voices, make better decisions and enable access to information. The platform has been used for many purpose including informing disaster response, monitoring corruption and mapping pollution.
The Platform tech stack is in two parts: a RESTful API built using modern, object-oriented PHP; and a web client built using modern JS and SASS. On the backend, we use PHP components from Kohana, Aura, Symfony, and League, along with other smaller libraries. On the frontend, we use AngularJS and Bourbon, along with many other smaller libraries. Our development stack also includes phpspec, phpunit, Behat, Gulp, Browserify.

REQUIREMENTS:

Roles and Responsibilities:

• Working collaboratively with a team to build and iterate on the Ushahidi platform
• Working across the full stack from API to frontend as needed
• Practice sustainable coding (code reviews, automated tests, Git, comments)
What We're Looking For
• Experience with some or all of our JS stack: AngularJS, Browserify, Leaflet and a bunch of smaller libraries
• Experience with some or all of our PHP stack: Kohana, Aura, Symfony, and League, along with other smaller libraries
• Willingness to help out where you’re needed: responding to coworkers, helping a community members fix a bug, or working deep in the code
• Eager to take feedback, grow and further your skills
• A passion for programming, open source, and open data
• Languages: PHP, Javascript
Bonus Points For
• Used or deployed Ushahidi’s tools
• Experience working on an open source product
• You love beautiful maps: using them and building them
• You get a kick out of tweaking a user interaction or API design till its just right
• Used any of: NodeJS, MySQL, Nginx, Vagrant, PostgreSQL, Symfony, Laravel, JS app frameworks (Backbone, React, Ember, etc), Browserify

Why You Might Be A Good Fit:

• Independence. Ushahidi operates under a de facto system of commander’s intent. That is, the team agrees upon a goal, but how it is accomplished is left largely up to everyone. Nobody will be leaning over your shoulder telling you what to do everyday, we expect you to be able to do that yourself.
• Intrinsically motivated. Ushahidi came from Nairobi, but team members work all around the world. If you need to come into an office and talk to your boss everyday to stay motivated, this job is not for you. If all you need is a crazy cool project, wifi, and coffee, then you’ll fit right in.
• Ability to get things done and ship. We’d love you to write beautiful elegant code every time but at crunch time: getting things done matters. You’ll need to pick the right balance between doing it right and doing it fast.
• Desire to work with the community, dig into their use cases, and help them solve problems. Ushahidi has a large and dedicated community whose needs have evolved.

Why You Might Not Be A Good Fit:

• We pay competitively at Ushahidi, however, keep in mind that we are still a mission driven non-profit.
• You only want to wear one hat. Ushahidi is growing (30+ employees) but we take on the goals of much larger organizations. In practice this means that all Ushahidians end up wearing multiple hats and working on multiple projects (case in point: I am writing this job description). If that excites you, great! If you are set on never venturing out of your job title, you’re going to get frustrated fast.
• You want to be in an office surrounded by colleagues. You will most likely be operating on your own unless you are based in Nairobi, where about half our team is based.

BENEFITS:

Why Working At Ushahidi Is Awesome:

• We reward taking risks. Ushahidi works on the bleeding edge of technology for social change, that means taking risks with our efforts. We don’t celebrate failure, but we definitely celebrate swinging for the fences, regardless of the outcome.
• Our goal in hiring is to find great people first, great skills second.
• We generally don’t care where you live. As long as you have Internet access, live wherever you want. Ushahidi team members currently live all over the world: from Japan and New Zealand, to Nairobi and San Francisco.
• We don’t care when you work. There are no “business hours” at Ushahidi, we are milestone based, not a sit-in-your-chair from 9 to 5 company.
• We don’t care when you work. There are no “business hours” at Ushahidi, we are milestone based, not a sit-in-your-chair from 9 to 5 company.
• Quality of life. Ushahidi attracts workaholics, so we all work hard to make sure everyone has a work-life balance.
• Benefits. Take what you want vacation policy (Minimum 25 days a year), parental leave, allowance for health insurance, allowance for a coworking space.

To Apply:
https://ushahidi.workable.com/jobs/51863/candidates/new