Overview

Poetic Justice at MIT Media Lab researches social inequality across multiple fields to develop projects in sound, video, sculpture, installation and publication. We’re currently looking for two Backend Developers to work on a series of participatory public artworks for which we’ve been collecting sound and video recordings from participants around the world and remixing them into sound and video works, including A Counting and Freedom Radio. A Counting has been featured on NPR and in the New York Times.

Backend Developers will scale our existing backend systems for collecting audio and video recordings, editing and transcribing multilingual voice recordings, analyzing transcripts, and generating stories using transcripts. This can be a full-time role with benefits or freelance. We’re open to remote work but should be on the east coast, preferably in NYC or Boston areas. Join our team and help us create a diverse portrait of languages used in the US.

Responsibilities:

  • Develop interactive voice response (IVR) systems using Twilio and Vonage.
  • Develop scalable systems to record, store and manage audio and video recordings
  • Develop scalable systems to transcribe audio and video recordings in multiple languages and formats
  • Develop scalable tools for narrative generation
    Develop dashboards and reports for user engagement and topic generation, content summarization
  • Develop unit and integration tests for existing projects.
  • Develop middleware to protect internal routes in existing projects.

Basic Qualifications:

  • Minimum of 3 years of web development/architecture experience
  • Minimum of 2 years of experience with Python using Flask or Django
  • Minimum 2 years of experience with third party APIs within Python web applications
  • Minimum of 3 years of experience with modern DevOps tools, such as Git and GitHub
  • Bachelor’s degree or equivalent work experience.

Preferred Qualifications:

  • Experience with installation, configuration, and development including work within a production environment
  • Experience with DevOps and Agile engineering practices
  • Experience deploying systems into a production Cloud Native Environment with major cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform
  • Experience with NLP libraries such as Spacy, Hugging Face, and NLTK
  • Experience with web application design and development using React or Angular
  • Experience with voice application design and development using Twilio or Vonage
  • Experience with Twitter and Slack bot development

Professional Skill Requirements:

  • Ability to work creatively and analytically
  • Ability to communicate clearly and concisely in both technical and non-technical language
  • Ability to collaborate and pair-program effectively
  • Ability to work independently

To apply, please email a short cover letter and resume to: pjg-jobs@media.mit.edu.