Staff Programmer

Staff Programmer

About the Opportunity

The College of Social Sciences and Humanities is a leader in the Experiential Liberal Arts. The College is strongly committed to fostering excellence through diversity and enthusiastically welcomes applications from members of groups underrepresented in higher education administration.

Responsibilities:

The Staff Programmer will help deploy a scalable, robust data-collection system called the Observatory for Online Human and Platform Behavior [1]. We are building a research infrastructure that will collect data on the online behavior of a very large sample of subjects in a secure, privacy-protecting fashion, from personal computers and mobile devices (tablets and mobile phones) and provide analytic access to the scientific community. This observatory will collect data on the important online platforms-- such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon-- that structure what large numbers of people around the world do and see. It would allow the prediction of the spread of disease and the rise and fall of the economy. It would provide a moving picture of the major information platforms based on algorithmic auditing, fostering transparency and accountability.

The programmer will build client/server software that is efficient, scalable and self-managing to ensure high availability. This includes a web browser extension (using Javascript) and server-side code to collect and store data (e.g., using VPN proxies, as well as databases or NoSQL equivalents). This system will also provide authorized researchers access to the observatory to launch measurements, collect data, and analyze results.

This position is in a unique research environment, where the programmer will work on new and interesting problems and advance the state of the art.

[1] https://news.northeastern.edu/2021/10/07/exploring-online-behavior/

Qualifications:

Qualified candidates should have at least a BA/BS in computer science with a solid background in networking and distributed systems. We are looking for someone who is excited about building cutting-edge measurement systems, working with us on novel research and enabling new visibility into the online ecosystem that drives much of the world today. The ideal candidate should enjoy building large-scale, continuously running systems --- ones that ensure high availability and security through monitoring and that are resilient to failures and outages in system components. The candidate should be thoroughly familiar and proficient with modern ECMA/Javascript, regular expressions and DOM manipulation. Additionally, minimum of 4 years of experience with any of the following is a strong plus:

● WebExtensions APIs

● OpenVPN configuration

● REST API development

● Python

● MongoDB or other databases

● Hadoop/Spark

● GitLab pipelines

● Webdriver / Selenium / Puppeteer

● Linux scripting (e.g., Bash)

● Linux networking (e.g., tcpdump, netfilter)

● Basic mobile app development

○ Android app development (Kotlin or Java)

○ iOS app development (Swift or Objective-C)

Documents to Submit:

Resume and cover letter required.

Position Type

Information Technology

Additional Information

Northeastern University is an equal opportunity employer, seeking to recruit and support a broadly diverse community of faculty and staff. Northeastern values and celebrates diversity in all its forms and strives to foster an inclusive culture built on respect that affirms inter-group relations and builds cohesion.

All qualified applicants are encouraged to apply and will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, religion, color, national origin, age, sex, sexual orientation, disability status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.

To learn more about Northeastern University's commitment and support of diversity and inclusion, please see www.northeastern.edu/diversity.


To apply, visit https://northeastern.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/careers/job/Boston-MA-Main-Campus/Staff-Programmer_R103796



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