Web Developer

The Art Institute of Chicago is looking for an innovative and experienced engineer to join the Experience Design team, working specifically with the digital product team that supports the website. The Art Institute of Chicago is an encyclopedic art museum with more than 300,000 works in the collection. The web developer will collaborate with a small team of full-stack developers on the web team and work closely with other museum departments, including digital marketing, membership, strategy, and education. The developer will be directly responsible for optimizing the membership and visitor transaction experience, from an engineering perspective—front-end rendering, database and back-end management, along with the integration of analytics. The developer will be expected to work iteratively, responding and adapting to visitor behavior. A successful candidate will have a proven track record of hitting milestones, working collaboratively, communicating clearly, and of course, a love of code and all that it can bring to the museum experience.

REPORTS TO

The Web Developer will work onsite at the museum and report to the Web Architect.

Duties may include

  • Front End engineering. Collaborate with stakeholders to build the front-end experience in performant ways.
  • Database administration. Manage and maintain databases as needed.
  • Content Management system. Build and enhance CMSs with user efficiency in mind.
  • Quality assurance. Monitor systems and proactively diagnose issues.
  • Technical forecasting. Keeps apprised of updates to engineering frameworks and works proactively to keep systems up-to-date and functioning.
  • API integration. Integrate with data APIs, and build your own.
  • Security. Develop applications with a functional knowledge of security concerns and avoid common pitfalls.
  • Server, network, and hosting. Provide information, feedback, and guidance on hosting concerns. Build server infrastructure when needed.
  • Analytics. Works with an interdisciplinary team to observe and respond to trends in analytics. Integrates analytics and tweaks as necessary.
  • Work with the web manager to coordinate sprints, tackle tickets, and report on progress to stakeholders. Understands customer and business needs.
  • Track ticketing. Works with Jira within an agile structure to schedule sprints, organize tickets, and systematically tackle engineering tasks.
  • Open source code. When appropriate, commit code to GitHub, working with an open-source sensibility.
  • Search engine optimization. Analyze and optimize for search engines and page rankings.
  • Performance optimization. Monitor web performance and execute a technical strategy for improving page speed.
  • Please note that this position is responsible for critical operation systems and may require on-call assistance during nights or weekends in the event of systems failures.

Qualifications

  • Proficient in building MVC applications in object-oriented languages like .NET, PHP – Laravel
  • Comfortable with custom, modular Javascript as well as CSS BEM conventions
  • Versed in using package managers, such as Composer or NPM
  • Understanding of cloud platform services like AWS or Azure
  • Understanding of Git, and interested in keeping a clean commit history
  • Comfort with integrating with, as well as building and maintaining JSON APIs
  • Fluency in agile development. Familiarity with track ticketing systems like Trello, Jira, or Redmine

The Art Institute of Chicago is an equal opportunity, equal access employer fully committed to achieving a diverse and inclusive workplace.