Are you ready to join an open source software community that’s transforming the landscape for open scholarship? VIVO’s mission is to provide world-class open source software, standard data ontologies, linked open data, and services to our world-wide member institutions. VIVO is at the forefront of a rapidly emerging infrastructure for integrating and sharing information about researchers and scholars and their activities and outputs so as to promote data sharing, attribution, and teamwork within and across institutions. The outcome is a platform that enables discovery across a distributed network of institutions worldwide.

VIVO seeks a dynamic, creative, and innovative Technical Lead for the project. The VIVO Technical Lead will play a major role in a movement that will shape the future of scholarly discovery and collaboration.  The VIVO Technical Lead is a full-time position. Working collaboratively with the VIVO Project Director, accountable to the VIVO Steering Group, and employed by the non-profit DuraSpace organization, the Technical Lead will enable the VIVO community to accomplish its goals by fulfilling the following responsibilities:

Overview of Responsibilities

The VIVO Technical Lead will be responsible for providing leadership, technical guidance, coordination, and support to the open source community in its work to maintain, enhance, and evolve the VIVO software and ontology, and to integrate community-produced apps and tools.  The Technical Lead will ensure that the VIVO software products fulfill the mission and strategic direction of the project and the needs of community members.  Additionally, the Technical Lead will lead the effort to ensure that VIVO implementation tools and application interfaces are made user-friendly and provide value “out of the box.”

The Technical Lead will foster an inclusive, welcoming, and open team environment, based on a meritocracy of committers, contributors, ontologists, documentation specialists, technical trainers, and other volunteer contributors.  S/he will recruit new members to the team from the larger community of volunteers.  S/he will organize events such as hackathons, training sessions, implementation fests, and the like to provide multiple on-ramps for new contributors.

The Technical Lead will organize development sprints and team meetings that are oriented towards incorporating all the work of the project – core development, apps and tools creation, ontology work, documentation, etc. – into an established release schedule.

S/he will attend VIVO Steering Group, Leadership Group, and Management Team meetings. The Technical Lead, working in partnership with the Project Director, will oversee a process of eliciting and documenting new use cases that will be gathered from the VIVO membership.  The process will include steps for surveying the community on feature priorities and will culminate in a published, evolving roadmap of future work that aligns with the VIVO strategic plan and value proposition.

S/he will coordinate technology activities among the Implementation, Development, Applications and Tools, Ontology, and Community Engagement Working Groups; identify, document, and communicate dependencies between working groups; and identify solutions to enhance cross-working group collaborations. The Technical Lead will provide support to technology Task Forces and will monitor their progress.

S/he will provide oversight and coordination of VIVO architecture work and ensure that VIVO core code, ontology, and applications and tools meet open standards; will work with the community to support ontology improvements, integrate community extensions and deliver applications and tools as tested optional extensions to VIVO; maintain code base infrastructure; and coordinate release management and testing activities.

S/he will work collaboratively with developers and stakeholders to create and maintain a technical roadmap and will collaborate on strategic planning. S/he will develop an understanding of the impact of technical decisions on budgets, timelines, and the sustainability of the VIVO open source project.

The Technical Lead will act as a technology spokesperson for VIVO, speaking and giving presentations at meetings, conferences, and other events.

The VIVO Technical Lead will coordinate project work by:

• Facilitating scoping of project efforts, soliciting and approving technology Task Forces, and soliciting community participation;
  
• Tracking the progress of Task Force deliverables within defined scope and time;
  
• Tracking, reporting, and communicating project status, progress, and deliverables among technology teams;
  
• Identifying, addressing, and/or escalating issues that pose risks to the project;
  
• Coordinating user acceptance testing within the community.
  

The VIVO Technical Lead will provide technical leadership, guidance, and support to VIVO Working Group leads and technology Task Forces in the following areas:

• Software engineering;
  
• Performance tuning;
  
• Code refactoring;
  
• Pull requests;
  
• Ontology management;
  
• System architecture;
  
• Test writing;
  
• Continuous integration testing;
  
• Code documentation;
  
• Release management;
  
• Technical discussion on project email ;
  
• Project infrastructure (email lists, blog, vivoweb.org website, IRC, issue tracking, continuous integration, GitHub code repository, SourceForge file repository, VIVO wiki resources).
  

Skills and Competencies

Required:

• Bachelors degree, preferably in computer science, or equivalent work experience;
  
• Minimum of five years technical work experience;
  
• Demonstrated leadership experience within a distributed open source team environment;
  
• Demonstrated success in mentoring, developing, and empowering staff with a collaborative and open approach; successful collaborations within and across organizations;
  
• Positive leadership style and ability to thrive in a fast-paced environment; demonstrated initiative and flexibility;
  
• Familiarity with academic institutions, research programs, and scholarly communication;
  
• Ability to document processes and specifications; use of modern documentation strategies that are coupled to the code and services;
  
• Fluency in the full stack of web-based technologies and architectures;
  
• Experience with current and emerging data architectures and technologies;
  
• Experience with linked-data technologies;
  
• Proficiency with Java and web scripting languages;
  
• Excellent communication skills, both oral and written, including the ability to communicate effectively with a diverse group of technologists, researchers, managers, funders, and peers;
  
• Demonstrated ability to manage expectations and priorities diplomatically among various stakeholders.
  

Desired:

• Past experience with and knowledge of best practices and current trends and issues in the application of technology to libraries, research programs, and academic institutions;
  
• Experience working with a diverse and international community;
  
• Experience in a startup environment;
  
• Knowledge of semantic web and linked data technologies, SPARQL, RDF, OWL, relevant tools and APIs, and experience managing semantically annotated data, triple stores, and/or graph databases.
  

To Apply:  Send a cover letter and resume to [log in to unmask].  Screening of applications will commence immediately and continue until the position is filled.

DuraSpace is an independent 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization providing leadership and innovation for open technologies that promote durable, persistent access to digital data. We collaborate with scholarly, scientific, cultural, and technology communities by supporting open source projects and creating services to help ensure that current and future generations have access to our collective digital heritage.                                                       

DuraSpace is an affirmative action/equal opportunity employer committed to diversity, equity, and inclusiveness.  We offer a competitive salary and benefits package, a work-from-home lifestyle, and a supportive peer group.  Significant travel is expected.