Job Title: Public Interest Technologist / Civic Hacker
Location: David N Dinkins Municipal Building, Civic Center, Manhattan.
Salary: Salaried, full time position, $80,000; benefits provided by the Fund for the City of New York.
Summary: BetaNYC is New York City’s civic technology, open data, and civic design community. Starting as a meetup in 2009, it has since grown to be a non-profit organization that hosts events, facilitates policy change, demystifies big ideas, and empowers a new generation of civic hackers. In a strategic partnership with the Manhattan Borough President Gale A. Brewer, BetaNYC is evolving a technology and design lab to support for the City’s community boards.
Via human centered design practices, BetaNYC has worked with the Manhattan Borough President and Community Boards to outline a number of digital tools and data insights to improve community board operations. Now, we seek an energetic resident technologist and civic hacker to help maintain our digital projects, help build new tools, and help mentor our civic innovation fellows.
We are looking for a creative technologist / software developer and effective communicator who can work diligently in a small diverse team, support BetaNYC’s work and ensures coordination across technology projects.
If you think you meet many of these qualifications (not 100%), reach out anyway. We know that a savvy hacker can grow into this position. Ideally, you are a creative thinker who wants to solve civic problems at scale. We operate on open source principles: you should know how to communicate, collaborate, and think about our work as a collective effort.
Responsibilities and Duties:
- You will be responsible for making new civic tech tools and maintaining BetaNYC’s digital/web products (eg BoardStat, Boundaries Map, CityGram, the Community Data Portal, SLAM, Tenants Map, etc)!
- You will report to the Executive Director, with whom you will set weekly objectives.
- Manage communications with various stakeholders groups, not limited to elected officials, government agencies, community board members, community organizations, and private sector partners.
- Give presentations and trainings; write how-to documents.
- You will be expected to create and maintain documents via Google Docs Suite and Microsoft Office platforms, manage content on BetaNYC’s website, discussion boards, data portal, and Github.
Qualifications and Skills:
- Strong analytical skills; attention to detail in your communications, scheduling, interviews, research, and documentation. Punctual to meetings, phone calls, and online correspondence. Respect for deadlines.
- Ideally, you have significant experience working as a software developer with the background of development, design, and implementation of new or modified software products. You will be working as a tech team of one, and we will want you to ship code, perform project/product management, and design things.
- Strong knowledge of agile methodologies, open source tools, and the civic tech movement.
- A can-do solution oriented attitude. Thrives in a fast-paced, collaborative environment. Self-starter able to see what needs to get done and motivate individuals to get it done.
- Experience keeping many projects on schedule. Strong organizational skills including process management, project management and logistical considerations. Ability to work in a small team, articulate personal needs, work to address collectively defined goals, and collaborate on the defined mission.
- Strong communicator with the ability to present and host trainings / workshops with large and small groups of people. Must be able to present research findings and ideas in reports, memos, and blog posts. Ability to breakdown complex ideas into digestible concepts.
- Comfort and familiarity with various type of data, including spatial data — understanding of excel functionalities, data analysis and visualization methods, and APIs.
- Experience required — LAMP, Git, HTML, CSS, WordPress, Drupal, JavaScript, working with APIs, exposure to Ruby or Python, cross-browser compatibility, Security Principles, Web Services (REST/ODATA//SODA)
- Preferred experienced, but not required: Experience working with government stakeholders and/or experience working within government; knowledge of NYC’s open data sets and municipality produced tools like City Planning’s Geosupport; experience working with Discourse, CKAN, PowerBI, Socrata, Amazon Web Services, Salesforce, CiviCRM, AirTable, Carto, PostgreSQL, Google App Services; Business intelligence tools like Tableau, PowerBI, or Grafana, experience with ArcGIS or other GIS platforms
APPLY via screendoor < https://betanyc.forms.fm/pit-civic-hacker-job-posting > or send an email to jobs@beta.nyc with a cover letter explaining your capabilities and your resume/CV.
Benefits: BetaNYC is a 501c3 via the Fund for the City of New York. An overview of benefits and policies can be found at < https://fcnyforms.seamlessdocs.com/f/benefitsoverview >. Leave: Vacation, 20 days annually; Holidays, 12 days annually; Sick Leave, 15 days annually.