The Knowledge Futures Group, in association with Cold Spring Harbor Lab Press, eLife/sciety, and EMBO, is hiring a full-time Software Engineer on a 12-month appointment with an opportunity to drive the adoption of Docmaps, a community-endorsed framework for representing research object-level review/editorial processes in a machine-readable, interoperable, and extensible format. We’re looking for someone with daily programming experience, preferably working on developer tools, an understanding of semantic web principles, and interest in the academic publishing industry. We will pay you competitively, let you work a 4-day workweek from wherever you want, and take you and your ideas seriously. Join us!
Location | Remote |
|---|---|
Position Type | Full-time (4-day workweek, ~32 hours/week) |
Duration | 12 months, with potential to extend |
Compensation | $125,000 - $150,000/year, plus benefits |
Knowledge Futures Group, founded as a partnership between the MIT Press and the MIT Media Lab, is a non-profit institution that builds infrastructure for a more effective, equitable, and sustainable knowledge economy.
The program is a multi-phase effort to create, adopt and implement Docmaps, a common framework for representing object-level editorial processes in a way that is interoperable, extensible, and machine-readable. So far, we have convened a technical committee to de-risk and evaluate Docmaps and developed a pilot that uses Docmaps to display reviews from eLife’s Sciety platform on CSHL’s biorxiv and medrixv preprint servers. In the next phase, we will be further developing the Docmaps software development kit and documentation and driving adoption by spreading the word about Docmaps at community events and reaching out to and assisting partners in integrating Docmaps into their technology and workflows.
Lead development of the Docmaps SDK, including validation and visualization tools, examples, and technical documentation.
Work with partner developers to spec and where needed, help build and test Docmaps integrations with other systems, including preprint servers and academic content aggregators.
Consult with the Docmaps Project Lead and partner developers to advise on partnerships and integrations with other emerging standards like JATS4R, PrEF, NISO Peer Review Terminology, Project Notify, etc.
Participate in workshops and other opportunities to demonstrate or answer technical questions about Docmaps.
With the Docmaps Project Lead, prioritize, respond to, and fulfill technical requests from the Docmaps community.
You’re an experienced Web developer with an interest in advancing the original use-case for the Web: bringing research communities together.
You’re familiar with semantic web and decentralized web technologies, or excited to learn about them.
You have experience developing toolkits and documentation for an audience of fellow developers.
You have experience implementing experimental technologies in production environments.
You want to work on a team that respects your ideas about the design, user experience, and ethics of software, not just the code you produce.
You want to build tools that empower people without preying on them.
You’re ready to work on a small product team that will expect you to make and own significant decisions about software architecture, and engage with questions about product and design.
You want breathing room to experiment, be thoughtful, and get things right, but without losing sight of an active user base and an ambitious roadmap.
Work 4 days per week with a thoughtfully distributed team: we were a remote team before it was a global necessity, and put a lot of effort into making the remote experience a great one. Last summer, we experimented with working 4 days per week (8 hours per day), and never looked back. Learn more about how we work in our Handbook. As it becomes safe to travel and gather again, we are resuming our roughly biannual in-person team retreats at fun locations throughout the U.S., which began with our Vermont retreat in the fall of 2021.
Enjoy industry-standard perks: unlimited PTO with a yearly minimum, your own computer of choice, and the ability to work 4 days per week, fully remote — with regular in-person team retreats as safety allows — with a team that prioritizes remote participation.
Contribute to our larger mission at the Knowledge Futures Group: we’re building a future where the infrastructure to create and access knowledge is controlled by people who serve the public interest, starting with core projects like PubPub and The Underlay. As a KFG team member, you’ll be able to contribute to those efforts as well, and we’ll support any ambitions you might have to publish in our journal, the Commonplace, and beyond.
This position is now closed for new applications.
This role is open to applicants as either a one-year full-time, benefitted W-2 position within the U.S., or as a full-time contract role for applicants outside the U.S. You must be legally authorized to work in the U.S., or to be paid as a foreign contractor by a U.S. company, to apply for this role.
Cover photo by Clint Adair on Unsplash
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0)
