mySociety is looking for an experienced developer with Ruby skills to work on our Democratic Commons project: a concept of open and shared democratic data where anyone can contribute, and anyone can benefit. Were creating the core infrastructure, tools and data that will kickstart the Democratic Commons because we believe that the data that allow people to hold their own governments to account should be freely available to all. This is a fast-moving project with an ambitious timeline for the next year, so were looking for someone who can hit the ground running and will thrive in a dynamic environment. Well be working with a varied range of partners around the world; from volunteers and small NGOs to deep established engagements with Wikidata and Facebook. To be a good fit, you will be comfortable working with partners both big and small, listening to their needs and helping to translate those into plans, tickets and concrete features that you can implement. Youll come with the ability to discuss and explain technical concepts to non-expert stakeholders and will enjoy working on a variety of different kinds of problems, while thinking about the bigger picture.
No recruiters or agencies, please.
Key responsibilities You will be:
- Working within a small but growing development team to design, build and maintain a large-scale distributed architecture for sourcing and updating basic political information and making it freely available
- Developing the infrastructure that will allow the team to deliver datasets for countries at an escalating pace through the first year of the project
- Creating scrapers and tools that enable partners around the world to populate and correct data
- Communicating with partners to iterate and improve the tools and ensure they are fit for purpose for different levels of capability
- Contributing to a team culture of agile innovation focused on creative and responsive solutions to the challenges of a project with a growing scale
About mySociety Since 2003 mySociety have built and grown a series of democratic and civic websites and apps, including https://www.fixmystreet.com, https://www.whatdotheyknow.com, https://www.writetothem.com and https://www.theyworkforyou.com which are used by more than 10 million people each year. Whilst we continue to run our sites in the UK, we also help groups in over 40 other countries to establish and make a success of their own, similar sites. Our charitable work is made possible by major grants from funders such as the Omidyar Network, the Hewlett Foundation, and Google, who support our desire to share software, knowledge and good practice for the benefit of the global Civic Technology community. We work across three thematic areas, developing online services in Freedom of Information, Democracy and Better Cities. Our growing research team aims to establish how, whether and when Civic Technology can make a difference, and share these learnings widely with civil society and governments. Our project management style aims to minimise pain and distraction, and leave people to get on with doing great work, normally in small teams. Our commercial subsidiary mySociety Ltd delivers off-the-shelf services for local authority and other clients in the UK and abroad, along with commercial access to our data services and custom development work and consultancy. Its profits are reinvested into the work of the charity.
Deadlines and dates The application deadline is 10am GMT on Friday 15th December and interviews will take place the first week of January 2018. We will aim to notify applicants of whether or not they will be invited to interview by Friday 22nd December. Application instructions Your application should consist of a CV and covering statement. Use your covering letter to show us why your skills make you a good fit for this role. Were also going to want to see some samples of work that best represent you, so if you have examples online, let us know where to find them.
Benefits
Salary is in the range of £43,000 to £52,000 depending on experience, plus pension (3% employer contribution, 5% employee). This is a one year fixed-term contract. We expect you to be based in the UK and you need to have the right to work in this country (sorry, but we cant offer help with visas or relocation expenses). mySociety is an adaptable, understanding employer and we have some great benefits including 25 days off per year (plus bank holidays), a new laptop, flexible working patterns, a yearly annual retreat and regular company meetups in cities up and down the country. Read more at https://www.mysociety.org/about/careers. We welcome people who are committed to making a difference, but we take work life balance very seriously and we celebrate the idea of quality, not quantity of working hours: if you work more than your contracted hours then we insist on time off in lieu to compensate. Most of our staff work remotely whilst still seeing each other face to face as often as we can. We work from home, co-working spaces, or small offices. We have small clusters of people around Bristol and London and would particularly like to hear from people based near those cities, but will accept applicants from anywhere in the United Kingdom. We ask that you are willing to travel to other parts of the country to see colleagues and clients perhaps a dozen times a year. You can read more about what its like working at mySociety at www.mysociety.org/about/careers/culture/.
