Rice University’s OpenStax Tutor initiative is searching for a well-qualified Python/Web developer to join a team of engineers, researchers, and visionaries working to advance the frontiers of online personalized learning. Tutor (https://tutor.openstax.org) brings together online learning platforms, repositories of open educational resources, techniques from cognitive science, and advanced machine learning algorithms to provide a world-leading educational experience for educators and learners. Our research and development team seeks a motivated research developer to work with our research scientists to develop infrastructure for conducting R&D to improve the algorithms for our suite of learning products.

The primary responsibility of the successful candidate will be software development for OpenStax R&D, including OpenStax Labs, a tool used to conduct internal research studies in education/cognitive. OpenStax Labs is aweb-based learning tool for conducting studies on machine learning and cognitive science algorithms for improving learning and knowledge retention in K-16 academic environments. The toolsrun an ever-expanding suite of cognitive-science best practice algorithms and machine learning algorithms on it in near-real time and in batch processes, and return recommendations and analytics produced by those algorithms.

Secondary responsibilities will include helping to design, conduct, and analyze the results of research studies, data processing, building libraries to interface with the research tools, as well as helping to develop any of the other tools and products within OpenStax.

Full time contract is for 6 months with a possible extension. We prefer the Houston location to interact directly with our research team, but have experience working with remote developers and are open to having someone remote for this position. We will consider contract or employee (of Rice University).