About the Harvard Innovation Labs:

The Harvard Innovation Labs is a unique collaboration and education space designed to foster entrepreneurship and innovation across Harvard University. The Harvard Innovation Labs consists of three labs with many offerings:

1. The i-lab is a resource available to all current students from any Harvard school who are looking to explore innovation and entrepreneurship at any stage. The i-lab provides all the physical and intellectual resources current Harvard students need to develop and grow, including intimate advising, office hours with industry experts, workshops, the Venture Incubation Program (VIP), and the President’s Innovation Challenge. Open co-working space is also available for any Harvard student looking to grow as an innovator.
2. Launch Lab X is a newly-created program for the 2018-2019 academic year, starting in September and culminating at the PIC Awards Ceremony in May. Launch Lab X will be comprised of about a dozen alumni-led ventures, and will be housed within the i-lab.
3. The Pagliuca Harvard Life Lab is a shared laboratory space for high-potential life sciences and biotech startups founded by Harvard faculty, alumni, students, and postdoctoral fellows. The 15,000-square-foot facility has 36 lab workbenches, 50 co-working spaces, conference rooms, and kitchen.

Job overview:

The Harvard Innovation Labs is looking for an experienced and talented Full-Stack Ruby on Rails developer to contribute to the envisioning, building, and support of the technology that makes the Innovation Labs run.   You’ll be responsible for backend design and data modeling, api design and integration, and frontend implementation.

We use a modern set of frameworks and technologies: Ruby On Rails 5, ActiveRecord, jQuery,  PostgreSQL, Bootstrap, Heroku and AWS.

Primary Responsibilities:

• Building and supporting the applications used to make the Innovation Labs run effectively and efficiently
• Writing clean, maintainable and efficient Ruby and Javascript code
• Designing robust, scalable and secure features
• Ensure code quality, organization, and automatization
• Contributing in all phases of the development lifecycle

Skills:

• Experience with Ruby on Rails 5 and Postgres, along with other common frameworks
• Experience building and deploying JSON APIs and using web hooks
• Experience with Bootstrap
• Advanced experience with Active Record
• Understanding of fundamental design principles behind a scalable application
• Heroku, Amazon Web Services
• Skilled at working on small distributed teams
• Understanding of Jquery data tables

Additional Qualifications:

• Data Visualization experience
• Ionic is a strong plus
• Reactive Native is a strong plus
• SQL Views with Scenic

Key Behaviors:

• Proactive
• Collaborative
• Methodical
• Thorough
• Avid Learner

Why you’ll love this job:

• You’ll have the flexibility to expand the parameters of this role.
• You’ll get to work with a truly supportive and dynamic team.
• You’ll be knee-deep in a truly cross-Harvard community, with passionate students, dedicated staff, and endless opportunities.
• You’ll get to know hundreds of early-stage companies working in every industry, led by enthusiastic Harvard students from all 13 Harvard Schools.
• You’ll also learn some lessons along the way about how a startup functions – because the i-lab is a startup too. We’re always iterating.

Why you would be good at this job:

• You enjoy working as part of a team and feel comfortable sharing your thoughts.
• You have a “no job is too big or small” philosophy about work.
• You maintain high standards of excellence and a keen attention to detail.
• You like working in a fast-paced and multi-faceted environment.

Why we’ll love working with you:

• You’re a team player and can work closely with your colleagues on multiple projects.
• You’re creative and like creative problem solving and sharing your ideas with your team.
• You demonstrate strong diplomacy, professional courtesy, and interpersonal skills.
• You maintain your sense of humor and positive attitude in all situations; fitting in with our hard-working but lighthearted team.
• You demonstrate the i-lab personality: Passionate, Nimble, Thoughtful, Clever.

Requirements and Qualifications:

• 3-5 years of engineering experience with at least 2 years with Ruby on Rails
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, comfortable working with non tech constituents
• A strong work ethic, and highly collaborative, success-oriented attitude
• Must primarily be able to work on site, but there is some flexibility for remote work
• Willingness to learn new skills and to share your skills with other engineers, stakeholders and students.

Important details:

Hours: 

We are looking for someone who can work 35 hours a week onsite with option of remote work occasionally. This is a contractor position so benefits are not offered. You must also be able to bring your own computer.

Location:

Harvard i-lab, Batten Hall, 125 Western Avenue, on the edge of the Harvard Business School campus. (To get here, either use the free Harvard shuttle or enjoy a 15-minute walk from Harvard Square.)

To apply:

Please send a cover letter and resume as a single PDF, titled “[First name] [Last name] Full-Stack Developer application”  to [email protected] with the email subject line “Application for Full-Stack Developer position”.

Direct Reports: None

Reports To: Director