Technical Team Lead, Institutional Services

United States·New YorkFull Timelead

OtherTechnical Team Lead

0 views0 saves0 applied

Apply Now

Quick Summary

Overview

This is not a remote position; this position requires being in the office three days a week in NYC.OverviewDo you want to work for a mission driven organization that cares about privacy, accessibility, sustainability, and ethical technology? Join us at the New York Public Library!

Key Responsibilities

Understand NYPL technical needs to define system specifications Design and implement scalable, optimized, and maintainable APIs and other applications Collaborate with multiple teams working on platforms to build innovative and forward-looking…

Technical Tools

javapythonreacta11ycode-reviewetlmentoringpeople-management

This is not a remote position; this position requires being in the office three days a week in NYC.

Overview
Do you want to work for a mission driven organization that cares about privacy, accessibility, sustainability, and ethical technology? Join us at the New York Public Library!

NYPL Digital is the department responsible for the digital transformation of the Library in order to facilitate delivery of core patron-facing services through digital platforms.

NYPL is hiring a Technical Team Leader in our Institutional Services group to lead a full-stack engineering team building and maintaining our digital platforms, and pushing forward our unified patron experience vision across multiple applications and databases.

The role will be responsible for supporting several codebases (Python, React, Java, XML) focused on providing access to digital library resources for NYPL patrons, researchers, educators, and students around the country. This involves maintaining legacy codebases and developing new applications to help patrons access NYPL’s collections.

This role will also contribute to the technical leadership of NYPL Digital by helping set standards for best practices in application development, database management, people management, and other technical areas. It will also have the opportunity to contribute to other catalog-based projects at NYPL, with a focus on increasing the adoption of Python as a standard language in the department.

The Technical Team Lead role requires a mix of people management and hands-on technical contributions.

We are looking for someone we can count on to:

Own:

Important APIs and data pipelines that support NYPL’s digital platforms like the Library Card experience, MyLibraryNYC, Single Sign On etc, integrating with a variety of catalog systems owned both by NYPL and 3rd party vendors
A broad base of technical knowledge to be able to identify solutions for difficult problems
The day-to-day management of a full-stack team and their technical priorities, helping coordinate their work with cross-functional partners, collaborators, stakeholders, and leadership.

Teach:

Support and mentor other engineers, helping them deliver results on time and in accordance with department standards
Present on their and the team’s work to technical and non-technical stakeholders
Build support for the team’s work among various interested parties
Align approaches to development between development teams, sharing best practices

Learn:

Gain an understanding of library science practices, especially around metadata standards and formats
Connect the dots between different applications to understand how data and user experience can be shared between them
Collaborate with other Technical Team Leads to help improve Digital’s culture and implement best practices in software development

Improve:

Grow as a team member, collaborating with other NYPL engineers to solve problems
Seek to retire legacy applications and replace them with modern, streamlined solutions

Some expectations for this role are that within:

1 month, this person will:

Develop an understanding of our infrastructure, environments and deployment practices
Implement unit and integration tests for all the code that they write
Complete software development tasks independently and collaboratively in line/accordance with our engineering workflows

3 months, this person will:

Gain an understanding of the team’s group’s codebases and familiarity with other NYPL codebases
Regularly perform code review of other engineers’ work
Actively participate in design and architecture discussions
Participate in conversations about team’s project progress and help report on status to Digital leadership

6 months and beyond, this person will:

Actively contribute to team’s code bases and understand code bases around NYPL Digital
Provide technical advice and weigh in on decisions that impact our platforms and help realize implementation of new features and bugfixes
Regularly influence design and architecture discussions
Collaborate with other Technical Team Leads to deliver new features across NYPL Digital
Take responsibility for new development work, coordinating the work of other engineers
Help lead development teams by taking accountability, mentoring developers, fostering collaboration and generally aiding the adoption of best practices
Influence and empower the team to build useful, accessible applications in a sustainable and maintainable way

Responsibilities:

Understand NYPL technical needs to define system specifications
Design and implement scalable, optimized, and maintainable APIs and other applications
Collaborate with multiple teams working on platforms to build innovative and forward-looking applications for our patrons
Build software following industry best practices and NYPL values (https://github.com/NYPL/engineering-general)
Work with product/project managers on estimating the feasibility and complexity of new products/features
Mentor and coach junior developers on best practices and career growth Communicate priorities and system requirements to software development teams
Manage a small team of 2-4 full-stack engineers
Motivate staff and create spaces where they can ask questions and voice their concerns
Be transparent with the team about challenges, failures, and successes
Research and recommend solutions based on cost benefit analysis and embracing automation and efficiency.
Ask questions to ascertain the feasibility of the technical approach and guide the team if not