AVP is looking for talented, diverse, energetic, and creative folks to join our team of software engineers.

At AVP, we partner with amazing organizations to help maximize the value of their data and information assets. We untangle complex data management challenges and enable organizations to protect, manage, and leverage their assets through our consulting services, software products, and custom software development services. We holistically straddle human, business, and technological aspects of each challenge, apply proven and rigorous approaches, and collaborate with customers to innovate and overcome. We love solving difficult problems that have a positive impact on people and organizations. Take a look at our portfolio and you’ll see what we mean. Recent and upcoming software projects include Library of Congress Labs Humans in the Loop, Save the Black Press with Black Voice News, History Pin with Shift Collective, and AudiAnnotate Audiovisual Extensible Workflow (AWE) project with University of Texas. 

We are deeply committed to creating a more equitable and inclusive world. We pursue our values through our work, ensuring that accurate and authentic data is used to create breakthrough solutions and solve knotty problems. We also stand firmly committed against systemic racism and all other forms of oppression and hold ourselves accountable for taking actions that reflect our values. With these values firmly in place, we welcome potential team members who share our commitments and reflect a diverse array of lived perspectives and experiences.

We are currently growing and developing our software engineering services. We build desktop applications, web applications, data warehousing services, and integration middleware. We transform data and migrate it from system to system. We write data acquisition services and public data APIs. We design digital forensic analysis tools. Although each client and challenge is unique, we use consistent approaches that allow our clients to make immediate progress toward their vision.

We are looking for a Senior Engineer with experience across the entire software development lifecycle to join our team and to lead and contribute to the wide array of development projects we support, as well as to assist in the continued improvement of our operations and infrastructure. Experience building scalable cloud services, distributed systems, and/or database systems would be a plus.

Read more below and apply!

P.S. If you’re not interested in or available for this position, but know someone who is, we would really appreciate it if you passed this along!

What you’ll do

As a Senior Software Engineer with AVP, each day will be different, but rewarding:

• You will work with incredibly diverse organizations, from media and entertainment companies to financial organizations, hospitals to university libraries, tech companies to governments.
• You will develop, design, and test software for SaaS products, desktop applications, web applications, middleware, and data services.
• You will advise AVP and our clients on new technologies.
  
  • NWF Visipec (Data warehouse and public API)
  • Python scripts for acquiring data from the internet from publicly accessible APIs and writing the data to our Postgres warehouse.
  • Python and PL/pgSQL scripts for normalizing and correlating acquired data for Postgres table storage.
  • .Net and C# public API to provide data services for client partners.
  • AWS infrastructure for all server, network, and database services.You will work daily with AVP’s software team — currently a mix of external and internal developers — on an array of development projects for AVP clients. Below is an example of one of our client’s tech stacks:
• You will work daily with AVP’s software team to support and continue to develop AVP’s suite of existing and emerging software products. Below are examples of two of AVP’s product technology stacks:
  
  • Aviary (SaaS product)
    • Integration of external services like IBM-Watson STT, Trint STT, Stripe, and Wasabi Storage.
    • Auto-scaling EC2 instances, Elastic Load Balancing, RDS, and S3 infrastructure in AWS.
    • A harmonious stack of HTML, CSS/SASS, Ruby on Rails, Solr, React.js, and Javascript.
  • Fixity Pro (Desktop application)
    • Java (OpenJDK)
    • Swing UI
    • Paddle subscription integration
• You will collaborate with one or more of our subject matter experts for each project or product.
• You will work closely with clients to identify needs and scope projects that meet their most pressing data management challenges.
• You will design development project approaches, timelines, and outcomes in order to deliver on time and within budget.
• You will formulate, test, and refine solution hypotheses.
• You will help to improve AVP dev ops practices and policies.
• You will look for ways that we can improve, sharing your suggestions with the team, training and mentoring others, and creating internal documentation.

A little about you

• You value diverse identities and experiences. You are culturally competent.
• You are a strong collaborator and an independent thinker.
• You are curious, and eager to dig a little deeper to figure out the why and how.
• You are comfortable working independently and in a team setting.
• You are always learning and improving.
• You really care about the details.
• You are able to research innovative solutions for challenging business/technical problems.
• You have 5+ years of full lifecycle software development/engineering experience in environments that use Agile and Scrum project management methodology.
• You have expertise in at least two development languages; and competency in two others (AVP most commonly uses Ruby, Java, C#, .NET, Python, PHP, and Javascript).
• You have backend data persistence expertise using databases and datastores, preferably SQL-based.
• You have knowledge of network and application security practices.
• You write consistent, efficient, and well-documented code, including the creation of technical documentation for deployment and maintenance.
• You have a working knowledge of continuous integration/deployment processes and systems.
• You bring an ability to debug and optimize code, and to automate routine tasks.
• You are experienced administering web servers, Git repositories, databases, and network services.
• You have experience creating, developing, delivering, deploying, and maintaining online services.
• You have experience developing in the cloud (e.g., AWS, Azure, or Google).
• You are comfortable designing architecture for the processing, storage, and analysis of large structured and unstructured data sets.
• You have some knowledge of (or are interested in learning about) the domains of Library Science, Forensic Analysis, Data Acquisition, Machine Learning, Product Management, Data Modeling, UX Research, and/or Taxonomy.
• You have knowledge of open source coding practices, licenses and technologies.

Bonus points

Optionally, you may have expertise in one or more of these areas:

• Digital audiovisual content. You are familiar with digital audiovisual formats and the common challenges developers face when working with such formats in web applications, storage configurations, and desktop applications.
• Digital asset management. Maybe you have developed for a DAM vendor or implemented a DAM (or similar system) in a previous role.
• Data wrangling. You are a whiz at mapping, normalizing, and transforming structured data.
• System architectures. Maybe you were a systems integrator in a past life.
• Digital preservation. If you know about this, you know what we are talking about.

If you don’t have one of those four more specific skills, but feel you would be a good fit based on the description above, we still want to hear from you!

What we offer

We work really hard to make working at AVP an amazing experience. We have a team full of truly exceptional people—the kind you’ll be excited to work with. Here’s how we operate:

Live Where You Want

We’re a distributed team, so you can live and work wherever you want. As of 2020, most people are used to working remotely, but we’ve been doing it for years, and will continue to once the world opens back up. We do have offices in Brooklyn, and Madison, WI—if you live in one of those areas, our crews there would love to have you. The rest of us are scattered around.

Work/Life Balance

We work hard and smart, but we’re in this for the long haul, no need to go crazy on the hours. We strive to make your workload manageable.

Take Vacation

We want you to take vacation. It’s important to get out and do something. We’ll look forward to seeing pictures of your vacation on Slack and hearing about your adventures at the weekly standup after you return. Even if you just need a break to sit on the couch for a week (we all know this feeling these days).

AVP Retreats

We get the whole team together two times a year to catch up, hang out, and plan for the future. In normal times, we’ll go to places like the mountains of Wyoming, the coastline of Florida (in the winter), and the cheese curds of Madison (at all times of year). We take advantage of working together, have strategy and planning sessions, bring in guest speakers and coaches, and do really fun things. The highlight is always hanging out together and having a blast.

Up Your Game

We’re serious about helping you improve your craft. We’ll support your attendance at conferences, online courses, and workshops, buy books and subscriptions. We have a culture of continuous improvement and we love to see our people growing (and teaching us what they learn!).

Benefits

You’ll be a W2 employee with benefits including medical, dental, vision, HSA, FSA, 401k, profit sharing, and more. AVP pays 80% of medical and dental insurance, and 100% of vision insurance. We also contribute 3% to your 401k whether you choose to throw any money in there or not. It vests immediately.

Be Yourself

At AVP we are committed to growing a representative team offering diverse perspectives from different age groups, abilities, races, ethnicities, cultural backgrounds, genders, gender identities, religious beliefs, and other lived experiences. AVP continually strives to promote a culture in which all employees feel included and where all voices are heard and appreciated. Whoever you are, wherever you call home, we want you to feel free to be your authentic self at work; and we want you to know that you will be authentically valued at AVP.

How to Apply

​​​​​​​If you have a prepared resume, attach it in PDF form. If you don’t have a resume because you aren’t even sure you’re looking to change jobs, that’s fine! An informal list of your work and education history are all we’re looking for. A LinkedIn profile would work too.

Attach a PDF of your cover letter. In your cover letter:

• Introduce yourself and explain why this position is of interest to you, and why you would be a great fit. Optionally, please include links to relevant past work and anything else that makes you look good, and describe your role in that work.
• Include answers to the following questions:
  • 1. What are the three most challenging obstacles you have faced when migrating structured data from one database environment to another? And how did you overcome them?
  • 2. Unit tests are inefficient and cost too much in project overhead. In a few paragraphs, argue for and/or against this point.
  • 3. I do my best work when … ? Please complete the sentence in whatever way you prefer. Please write at least a paragraph to add context to the sentence.

Interview Process
Skill Test and Exploratory Interview

We will provide a skills test for you to complete. Upon successful completion, we will contact you for a high level conversation to find out more about you, your interests, goals and objectives, background. Also to tell you about AVP, our culture, goals and objectives, services and products, and answer any questions you have.

In-Depth Interview

If the exploratory call goes well, one or two AVPeeps will meet with you, focusing in on a chronological walk-through of each job you have held focusing in on five core questions: What were you hired to do? What accomplishments are you most proud of? What were some of the low points during that job? Who were the people you worked with? Why did you leave that job? At the end of the interview we will discuss your career goals and aspirations, and you will have a chance to ask us questions.

Reference Interviews

If the in-depth interview goes well, we will ask you to introduce us to 3 references, representing previous supervisors, people that you supervised, and peer colleagues that you have worked with (as applicable).

All-Team Interview

If the reference interviews go well, there will be an all-team meeting set up with you. This is a chance for the team to meet you and for you to meet the team. The agenda is as follows:

• Round robin introductions of AVPeeps
• Candidate introduction
• AVP questions for you and discussion
• Your questions for AVP

Apply here!