I've been volunteering on the Ushahidi Swift pipeline, and it's been fascinating. The goal is to turn massive raw streams of tweets, text messages and news stories into useful information, something that's especially relevant looking at all of the recent turmoil around the world. Pulling data from unstructured text is one of the toughest and most interesting problems around, and Swift is a great platform to learn and test new approaches.
So I was pleased to hear from Jon Gosier that they're looking to hire some more engineers. The pay's not great compared to West Coast standards, but they're open to hiring globally, so it makes more sense for people in an area with a lower cost of living. They're also happy to accommodate side projects and offer a lot of flexibility as long as the work gets done. If you're looking a job on a great team working on important problems, this could be a good chance to gain experience in some very useful areas. Here's the full job posting.
Ushahidi is currently seeking to hire individuals in the following full-time and contract positions: Sr. Web Application Developer, Online Ethnographer/Behaviorist, Computational Linguistics Expert
Sr. Web Application Developer (Python/PHP)
Experience Requirements: At least 4 years professional experience in PHP/XHTML/MySQL/CSS building web applications. This position is minimum full-time for 12 months. Developers with a background in Design, experience with Ruby (Rails), Python (Django) and PHP Frameworks are definitely preferred but all candidates are welcome to apply.
Location: Anywhere, Global
Salary: $60k per year, U.S. dollars. 80% full-time commitment expected although candidates are welcome to maintain on side-projects so long as they don’t affect primary deliverables and deadlines.
Online Ethnographer/Behaviorist
Experience Requirements: PHD or PHD-Candidate level with a background in the qualitative study of network dynamics and ethnography of online communities. Position will require deep analysis of dynamics in online communities, and work alongside computer science teams to assist in the development of applications and algorithms based upon their research.
This position is minimum full-time for 12 months.
Location: Anywhere, Global
Salary: $60k per year, U.S. dollars. 80% full-time commitment expected although candidates are welcome to maintain on side-projects so long as they don’t affect primary deliverables and deadlines.
Computational Linguistics Expert (Python)
Experience Requirements: At least 5 years professional experience in the development of computational linguistic algorithms using Python. Applicant would supervise the development of open-source semantic technologies, with an emphasis on modularity and scalability. This position is contract.
Location: Anywhere, Global
Salary: Contract. Negotiable.
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