Biodiversity Informatics Programmer

Friday, 12 February 2016

The Biodiversity Centre of the Université de Montréal seeks a Biodiversity Informatics Programmer to develop and maintain web applications for the Canadensys network. Canadensys gathers biological collections data from Canadian universities, botanical gardens and museums in Canada. The network distributes this information via its own portal and through the Global Biodiversity Information Facility. The shared specimen information complies with the Darwin Core standard, is taxonomic, geographic, geospatial, temporal and/or historical in nature, and includes images.

The Biodiversity Informatics Programmer must be a Canadian citizen or landed immigrant and will be working at the Biodiversity Centre, located in the Montréal Botanical Garden. He/she will be supervised by Anne Bruneau, Science Director of the Biodiversity Centre and principal researcher of Canadensys, and other biodiversity informatics experts worldwide. The Programmer will interact with database managers, biologists, curators and researchers of the network’s institutions and may be required to travel to and participate in training workshops. He/she must be autonomous, resourceful, and able to learn quickly.

Responsibilities

• Develop new features for the network’s central web portal and underlying database.
• Maintain and extend the network’s current web applications, including data.canadensys.net/vascan.
• Install, use and collaborate in the development of open source biodiversity informatics tools.
• Assist the network’s researchers with technical issues and data migration, in close collaboration with the Digitized Collections Coordinator.

Required skills

• B.Sc. in Computer Science or equivalent.
• Experience with Java web application development (e.g. Spring MVC framework).
• Experience configuring and administering PostgreSQL and MySQL.
• Experience with indexing technology (e.g. ElasticSearch).
• Knowledge of build tools like Maven and/or Gradle.
• Familiarity with deploying production code to cloud-based services such as Amazon EC2, DigitalOcean, or Linode.
• Good knowledge of French and English.

Desirable Skills

• Familiarity with Linux (Ubuntu Server) system administration (e.g. Chef, Apache, and Tomcat) including virtualization.
• Experience with Hibernate.
• Experience with GIS technology (e.g. PostGIS).
• Experience with web technologies: backbone.js, jQuery.

To apply

Send the following to s.dupont@umontreal.ca:

• a letter of interest;
• a complete c.v.;
• a link to GitHub or other code depositories; and
• the names, affiliations and job titles (or other descriptor of responsibilities) of three references. Full contact information is not necessary at this point. References will not be contacted without prior confirmation with the candidate.

Complete contact information:

Stéphane Dupont, Manager, Biodiversity Centre of Université de Montréal, 4101, rue Sherbrooke est, Montreal, Quebec, H1X 2B2

Phone: 514-343-2066 / Fax: 514-343-2288

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This position is paid through grant funding. Current funds ensure a minimal employment period of 18 months. However, this is considered to be a long-term position within the Canadensys team and various grant application and other initiatives are underway to sustain it in the future. Other versions of this announcement have been/will be published (Jobboom, Université de Montréal Human Resources, etc.). All these announcements correspond to the same position and all applications will be evaluated side-by-side in the same evaluation process. It is not necessary to apply separately to each announcement. Evaluation of the applications will begin on Feb. 22, 2016. Applications will continue to be accepted after this date and will be evaluated using the same criteria until staffing of the position is completed.