Application Development Lead - Digital Archive of Indigenous Language Persistence

About the Opportunity About the College of Social Sciences and Humanities The College of Social Sciences and Humanities (CSSH) combines Northeastern University’s signature approach to experiential learning with liberal arts education, interdisciplinary research, and community engagement, both locally and globally. The College comprises 20 academic units, including two schools, eight departments, and ten interdisciplinary programs, as well as 15 research centers and institutes. Our faculty connects liberal arts education with the challenges of our time and fosters ethical reasoning and critical thought, with attention to the enduring significance of history, literature, and culture. CSSH promotes inquiry with global perspectives across interdisciplinary clusters of expertise, including Resilience, Sustainability, Health, and Equity; Cultural Studies, Governance, and Globalization; and Network Science, Computational Social Science, Digital Humanities, and Data Ethics. Job Summary The Application Development Lead leads the development of language preservation and persistence applications produced by the Digital Archive of Indigenous Language Persistence (DAILP) project at Northeastern University. These applications serve tribal communities working to preserve and sustain their Indigenous languages. The role works to understand community members’ and users’ needs and applies lean and agile methodologies to develop solutions that address those needs. The Application Development Lead serves as both a technical leader and hands-on contributor, leading a small team of 1–2 hourly software engineers, 1–2 student co-op developers, and a part-time Quality Assurance (QA) Analyst working 20 hours per week, with support from a Product Management/Assistant Product Manager contributor. The role also has primary, hands-on ownership of DAILP’s data pipeline and cloud infrastructure, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Terraform, and Nix systems currently held by a single departing team member, and is responsible for addressing identified data-resilience gaps. Key Responsibilities & Accountabilities Technical Execution & Ownership Design, develop, and maintain critical components in Rust, React, Terraform, PostgreSQL, and associated styling, following modern engineering practices. Own the DAILP data pipeline end-to-end, including data import/export, PostgreSQL schema and engine upgrades, and backup/restore automation using pg_dump, CSV export, and DAILP backup bundles. Ensure solutions meet high standards of performance, scalability, and reliability. Uphold architectural principles, coding guidelines, and system design patterns consistent with DAILP’s technical standards. Lead technical design discussions, propose improvements, and guide the team through implementation details. Participate in cross-team collaboration on shared libraries, continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) improvements, and platform-level enhancements. Implement web analytics and logging so application use can be tracked and understood. Data Resilience & Infrastructure Ownership Take primary ownership of AWS, Terraform, and Nix infrastructure credentials and access, and establish shared, access-controlled credential management. Carefully track and consider automating the manual data-migration/import trigger in GitHub Actions and add branch-target validation to prevent recurrence of past migration errors. Validate and document the stability of network paths, including the GitHub Actions runner, Maintenance Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), and AWS Lambda, used to reach the production database, including bastion-host and security-group configuration. Extend existing schema-level pgTAP tests with data-completeness checks, including row counts and checksums, to confirm that data and schema survive import and restore intact. Design and document a partial-failure and rollback plan for the data export/import pipeline. Team & De…

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