Media Cloud is Hiring a New Technical Lead

Teaser

The Media Cloud project (http://mediacloud.org) is seeking a technical lead to help us build tools that facilitate research about the role of digital media in civic discourse. Media Cloud is an open source and open data project that produces its own research about the networked public sphere and also facilitates others' research about online media by making available to the public its existing archive of more than 365 million stories and by collecting more than 300,000 new stories daily.

The Media Cloud project (http://mediacloud.org) is seeking a technical lead to help us build tools that facilitate research about the role of digital media in civic discourse. This position will be a joint position between the Berkman Center and the Center for Civic Media at MIT, and the application process is managed through MIT.  Interested applicants should submit a resume and cover letter referencing job no. 13129 at http://careers.mit.edu; keyword is Media Laboratory.
Media Cloud is an open source and open data project that produces its own research about the networked public sphere and also facilitates others' research about online media by making available to the public its existing archive of more than 365 million stories and by collecting more than 300,000 new stories daily. The technical lead will drive all technical aspects of the project, working with the principal research scientist that leads the research team to plan, design, build, and run all levels of the project's platform -- back end tools that collect and archive the platform's data, researcher tools that enable analysis of that data, and front end tools that expose the data and analysis to the public. This is a unique opportunity to both shape the concept and contribute to the hands-on development of tools.

Media Cloud is a joint project between the Center for Civic Media at MIT and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. The position will be based at the Center for Civic Media, but the technical lead will work closely with members of the team from both centers. The project is funded by human rights foundations, for whom we produce both the open platform and research that helps them making decisions about how best to influence online civic conversations about democracy, activism, and health.

We are a diverse team of researchers and technologists who love to wrestle with hard questions about online media by using a combination of social, computer, and data sciences. The ideal candidate will work well with all members of the team, from the principal research scientist to junior developers, and will thrive in an academic atmosphere that encourages constant questioning and validation at all levels of the platform and of our research products.

Much of our substantive work focuses on issues of gender, race, and globalization. We strongly encourage women, people of color, and people of any sexual identity to apply.

The job is based in Cambridge, MA, but much of our team is distributed around the world. We are open to flexible onsite working arrangements.

This is a one-year appointment with the possibility of extension.

Principal Duties and Responsibilities (Essential Functions):

  • Work alongside researchers as a senior member of the project to establish technical vision for the project;
  • Develop technical roadmap to meet research needs and complete grant deliverables;
  • Lead team of developers, designers, and system administrators in implementing technical roadmap;
  • Maintain, upgrade, and build systems within a large, existing codebase (https://github.com/berkmancenter/mediacloud) to collect, archive, and analyze content from online media;
  • Lead technical team in writing code to scale systems to handle ever-expanding data requirements;
  • Manage and coordinate independent contractors.

Required Qualifications:

  • Bachelor’s degree, preferably in computer science or data science-related field;
  • At least three years’ experience working in a technical leadership position and at least five years’ experience working as a software engineer or combined experience with advanced degree;
  • Passion for solving difficult engineering and data problems;
  • Demonstrated ability to design, build, test, and deploy robust code;
  • Demonstrated ability to work as a leader within a diverse team and iterate quickly through prototypes;
  • Demonstrated ability to use data to validate architectural decisions using data;
  • Programming fluency -- Perl, Python, and Javascript are ideal but other languages are fine;
  • Experience writing, maintaining, and optimizing SQL queries against large databases;
  • Experience scaling platforms to handle large data sets.

Preferred Qualifications:

  • Experience writing web crawlers;
  • Experience working with Postgres and Solr/Lucene;
  • Knowledge and interest in social sciences;
  • Experience and interest in working on issues related to democracy, gender, race, health, and globalization;
  • Experience as a data scientist;
  • Experience working on projects investigating online media.

Interested applicants should submit a resume and cover letter referencing job no. 13129 at http://careers.mit.edu; keyword is Media Laboratory.