Update (April 25, 2017)

All positions are now closed. Thanks to those who applied!

Update (Jan 1, 2017)

The positions have been reopened, and we will be accepting applications through the end of March, although hiring decisions may be taken before then. For more information, please see:

• Front-end developer position (no longer accepting applications)
• Back-end developer position (no longer accepting applications)
• Dev-Ops engineer position (no longer accepting applications)

Who we are

The Astrophysics Data System (ADS) is a digital library portal for researchers in Astronomy and Astrophysics which finds substantial use in the Physics and Geophysics communities. The ADS corpus consists of over ten million documents, and is growing at a rate of several thousand per week. Every Astronomy paper ever published and nearly every Physics and Geophysics article refereed in the past 20 years is fully indexed by the ADS. Over 50,000 scientists and librarians use the ADS daily.

The ADS project develops and maintains services to facilitate the discovery and access of the scholarly literature published in the relevant fields of research. The project embraces the spirit of openness long championed by NASA and the astronomy community in general: all the software we are developing is licensed to under an open source license model, and access to our data holdings is provided via an open API.

Who we are looking for

The ADS project has openings for four highly-motivated software developers to join its dynamic team of four IT specialists and three curators. The ADS is building a highly scalable and feature-rich platform using a modern development stack: a custom build of the open-source search engine Solr, an advanced UI built with Backbone, a scalable asynchronous data ingestion pipeline with RabbitMQ and PostgreSQL, and cloud-based hosting of its services with Amazon Web Services. The primary programming languages are Python, Java, and JavaScript.

The following positions are currently available:

• Front-end developer: a UX-aware individual interested in designing and implementing key components of the user interface, including user profiles, notifications, and search capabilities.
• Back-end developer (2 positions): focuses on implementing key components of the ADS IT infrastructure and services, including a robust metadata enrichment platform, text mining pipeline, and notification service.
• Devops specialist: a system developer experienced in architecting and administering key components of software infrastructure, including its search engine, user database, and cloud-based microservices.

What we offer

The ADS project is funded by NASA through a cooperative agreement and provides its services to the entire worldwide research community in astronomy and physics. We are hosted by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), one the largest and most diverse astrophysical institution in the world, where scientists carry out a broad program of research in astronomy, astrophysics and earth and space sciences. By joining our group you will be actively supporting the discovery and dissemination of scientific results to the worldwide research community!

Some of the perks of these jobs include:

• Work with a creative, multitalented team in a first-class academic environment
• Generous benefits, flexible work hours and (local) telecommuting options
• Access to the astronomical community and events at the CfA and Harvard University
• Engage with users at community meetings, present your work and findings at scientific conferences in astronomy and information science

For more information, please see:

• The ADS homepage
• The new ADS UI
• The ADS github repo
• Our twitter page
• The CfA website