Application Development Lead - Digital Archive of Indigenous Language Persistence

• Design, develop, and maintain critical components in Rust, React, Terraform, PostgreSQL, and associated styling, following modern engineering practices.

• Design, develop, and maintain critical components in Rust, React, Terraform, PostgreSQL, and associated styling, following modern engineering practices.
• Own the DAILP data pipeline end-to-end, including data import/export, PostgreSQL schema and engine upgrades, and backup/restore automation using pg_dump, CSV export, and DAILP backup bundles.
• Ensure solutions meet high standards of performance, scalability, and reliability.
• Uphold architectural principles, coding guidelines, and system design patterns consistent with DAILP’s technical standards.
• Lead technical design discussions, propose improvements, and guide the team through implementation details.
• Participate in cross-team collaboration on shared libraries, continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) improvements, and platform-level enhancements.
• Implement web analytics and logging so application use can be tracked and understood.

• Take primary ownership of AWS, Terraform, and Nix infrastructure credentials and access, and establish shared, access-controlled credential management.

• Take primary ownership of AWS, Terraform, and Nix infrastructure credentials and access, and establish shared, access-controlled credential management.
• Carefully track and consider automating the manual data-migration/import trigger in GitHub Actions and add branch-target validation to prevent recurrence of past migration errors.
• Validate and document the stability of network paths, including the GitHub Actions runner, Maintenance Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), and AWS Lambda, used to reach the production database, including bastion-host and security-group configuration.
• Extend existing schema-level pgTAP tests with data-completeness checks, including row counts and checksums, to confirm that data and schema survive import and restore intact.
• Design and document a partial-failure and rollback plan for the data export/import pipeline.

• Serve as the technical leader for a small team of hourly software engineers, student co-op developers, and a part-time QA Analyst working 20 hours per week, ensuring timely, high-quality delivery of sprint goals.

• Serve as the technical leader for a small team of hourly software engineers, student co-op developers, and a part-time QA Analyst working 20 hours per week, ensuring timely, high-quality delivery of sprint goals.
• Work hands-on as an individual contributor by contributing code, conducting code and design reviews, and solving complex technical challenges.
• Drive sprint planning, estimation, and execution in partnership with Product Management and QA.
• Ensure predictable, on-time delivery while balancing short-term sprint goals with long-term technical health.
• Promote agile best practices, collaboration, and a strong sense of ownership within the team.

• Understand the needs of DAILP’s users, including tribal communities, and develop solutions that address those needs.

• Understand the needs of DAILP’s users, including tribal communities, and develop solutions that address those needs.
• Support prototyping and user-testing methodologies to ensure community and user needs are met.
• Ensure application development work appropriately prioritizes features that deliver high community value.
• Build trust and rapport with tribal community representatives and technology stakeholders.

• Support iterative development principles, reinforcing the prioritization of features that deliver the most community and organizational value.

• Support iterative development principles, reinforcing the prioritization of features that deliver the most community and organizational value.
• Contribute to backlog feature/story definition and refinement.
• Help maintain a roadmap of features to support release planning.

• Drive a culture of engineering excellence, emphasizing code quality, maintainability, and automation.

• Drive a culture of engineering excellence, emphasizing code quality, maintainability, and automation.
• Collaborate with the part-time QA Analyst to ensure robust test coverage and high-quality releases.
• Proactively identify and reduce technical debt through refactoring and better design practices.
• Own continuous integration, deployment, and monitoring — this role holds primary DevOps responsibility for the project rather than partnering with a separate DevOps function.

• Mentor hourly software engineers and student co-op developers through code review, pairing, and onboarding — treating review as a teaching opportunity.
• Coordinate with the Project Leader, Assistant Project Coordinator and Assistant Product Manager on scope, priorities, and timelines.
• Foster clear communication across engineering, QA, and product to align priorities and resolve blockers efficiently.

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
• Seven or more years of application development experience, including two or more years in a leadership capacity.
• Experience producing and operating web-based applications using modern cloud-based architectures.
• Expertise with the current application technology stack, or similar experience with an eagerness to learn: PostgreSQL, Rust, GraphQL, AWS (EC2, Lambda, S3, Cognito, Amplify), GitHub Actions, Terraform, Nix, Terranix, and NixOS.
• Experience with relational database backup, restore, and disaster-recovery practices, including pg_dump/pg_restore, automated backup scheduling, and schema-migration tooling.
• Proven ability to balance leadership responsibilities with active, hands-on development and infrastructure work.
• Experience leading Agile/Scrum teams in the role of Scrum Master, Product Owner, or development lead.
• Experience leading application development efforts while ensuring delivery quality, scalability, and maintainability.
• Strong understanding of software design principles, system architecture, and performance optimization.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to influence across disciplines.
• Curiosity about Indigenous languages and a desire to help them thrive.

• Experience leading the development of one or more successful web applications serving a variety of communities and users.
• Familiarity with event-driven architectures or microservices.
• Experience or familiarity with product management, human-centered design, and a community/end-user focus.
• Experience designing CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure-as-code automation using tools such as GitHub Actions workflows, Terraform, and Nix.
• Familiarity with network and infrastructure security concepts, including virtual private cloud (VPC) routing, bastion hosts, security groups, and Amazon Machine Image (AMI) management.
• Passion for technical mentorship and continuous improvement.
• Experience or interest in Community-Centered Design, Human-Centered Design, and Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, and Ethics (CARE) Principles for Indigenous Data Governance.