Job Description
Summary
The Art Institute of Chicago is seeking an experienced application developer to support the ongoing development and maintenance of the Museum Collections' Digital Asset Management System. The Art Institute of Chicago is a world-renowned art museum housing one of the largest permanent collections in the United States. It is encyclopedic in nature with strong holdings across all media, all traditions and all ages. The Art Institute is particularly recognized for its extraordinary Impressionist, Modern, Contemporary and American collections, among other aspects of its holdings. The AIC Collection DAMS, named LAKE, is meant to become the central repository for preserving, managing, accessing and publishing millions of digital assets related to the life cycle of the AIC collection items. LAKE will store highly valuable digital assets and will be accessed by staff from over 25 departments with widely different access levels. LAKE is also meant to integrate with existing applications at the AIC, both as a data provider and as a data aggregator. LAKE is a groundbreaking effort from a major museum to embrace standards-based, community-driven open source software to build its core data repository. It is an exciting and challenging project requiring skilled personnel with a strong sense of team play.
Duties
LAKE consists of a Fedora repository serving as the main data store; an administrative front end forked off the Sufia project; an Apache Camel-based integration framework; triplestore and Solr indexes; a homebuilt media transform service; and a set of ETL scripts meant to migrate and synchronize data from other systems. A first beta release is scheduled for December 2015. The candidate will be responsible for developing, maintaining, deploying, testing and documenting software related to the above mentioned areas. The candidate will be in charge of prioritizing work according to tickets assigned to him or her via a bug tracking system (Redmine, Github), updating these tickets as work progresses, and requesting feedback via the same ticketing system when needed. The candidate may be required to review other developers' code, comment on commits and manage merging of pull requests and branches. The candidate may also be in charge of keeping the systems on which the distributed LAKE architecture runs in good health, helping to configure new systems, upgrading software packages and applying security patches promptly. He or she will coordinate these activities with the Network Services sysops. The candidate is expected to give realistic estimates, deliver in a timely manner, collaborate with other team members on overlapping areas, and switch between different projects according to priorities. We expect the candidate to dedicate part of his or her time to researching new technologies and keeping abreast of current tools, best practices and patterns used in relevant technologies as well as in the Digital Humanities fields. Attendance to conferences and other events related to museum and repository technology is expected. This position reports to the Director of Application Services, Collections and will work with other 4 team members.
Additional Info & Requirements
The Art Institute of Chicago is an equal opportunity, equal access employer fully committed to achieving a diverse and inclusive workplace.
The Community
The Art Institute of Chicago collects, preserves, and interprets works of art of the highest quality, representing the world’s diverse artistic traditions, for the inspiration and education of the public and in accordance with our profession’s highest ethical standards and practices.
HR Info
Employment Team
aic.employment@artic.edu
You can submit an application via our employment page: https://hrweb.artic.edu/recruit/applyjob.html Click "An external applicant seeking a staff job or internship." Then scroll down to the Senior Application developer position (job number 8961 towards the middle of the page) and follow the step by step instructions in submitting your application (you must register first).