Working at MIT offers opportunities, an environment, a culture – and benefits – that just aren’t found together anywhere else. If you’re curious, motivated, want to be part of a unique community, and help shape the future – then take a look at this opportunity.

SOFTWARE ENGINEER, Brain and Cognitive Sciences-MIT Early Childhood Cognition Lab, to lead development of the open-source online platform, Lookit, which allows researchers to design webcam-based developmental research studies and families to participate from their home computers at their convenience, rather than coming to a lab. Will be responsible for the entire stack, focusing primarily on the participant and researcher interfaces and backend API written in Python (Django framework). Challenges are diverse: “user experience” encompasses parents with squirming babies on their laps and researchers debugging study protocol specifications. Responsibilities include strategic feature prioritization and planning; developing scalable tools to support research workflows and improve the participant experience; contributing to the library of experimental components researchers use to specify study protocols implemented in Ember.js; conducting code reviews of contributions from other codebase contributors; managing automatic code deployment and hosting materials on a cloud-based platform; writing documentation and incorporating unit tests; managing contractors for a periodic security risk assessment; and ensuring the security of personally-identifiable data. May mentor undergraduate student contributors.

Job Requirements

REQUIRED: at least one year of professional experience managing cloud-based resources with Google Cloud Platform; full stack web development experience, including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Django (or another framework), and Python; comfort with distributed version control; desire to learn new technologies and write clean code others can understand; and comfort planning time strategically.

PREFERRED: professional programming experience; experience with Django and/or Ember; basic DevOps experience with deployment and continuous integration tools; experience using containerization technologies (Docker/Kubernetes);  interest in child development or human subjects research experience; familiarity with accessibility best practices; bachelor’s degree in computer science/related technical field; and experience maintaining an open-source project. Job #19244

Salary range: $110-125,000

This is a one-year appointment with the possibility of extension.

This position is fully remote for now but must be within the United States due to compliance issues.