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 & Delivery Leadership

- Serve as the technical leader for a small team of hourly software engineers, student co-op developers, and a part-time QA Analyst working 20 hours per week, ensuring timely, high-quality delivery of sprint goals.
- Work hands-on as an individual contributor by contributing code, conducting code and design reviews, and solving complex technical challenges.
- Drive sprint planning, estimation, and execution in partnership with Product Management and QA.
- Ensure predictable, on-time delivery while balancing short-term sprint goals with long-term technical health.
- Promote agile best practices, collaboration, and a strong sense of ownership within the team.

Community Member/Customer/User Focus

- Understand the needs of DAILP’s users, including tribal communities, and develop solutions that address those needs.
- Support prototyping and user-testing methodologies to ensure community and user needs are met.
- Ensure application development work appropriately prioritizes features that deliver high community value.
- Build trust and rapport with tribal community representatives and technology stakeholders.

Backlog and Roadmap Management

- Support iterative development principles, reinforcing the prioritization of features that deliver the most community and organizational value.
- Contribute to backlog feature/story definition and refinement.
- Help maintain a roadmap of features to support release planning.

Quality & Continuous Improvement

- Drive a culture of engineering excellence, emphasizing code quality, maintainability, and automation.
- Collaborate with the part-time QA Analyst to ensure robust test coverage and high-quality releases.
- Proactively identify and reduce technical debt through refactoring and better design practices.
- Own continuous integration, deployment, and monitoring — this role holds primary DevOps responsibility for the project rather than partnering with a separate DevOps function.

Mentorship & Collaboration

- Mentor hourly software engineers and student co-op developers through code review, pairing, and onboarding — treating review as a teaching opportunity.
- Coordinate with the Project Leader, Assistant Project Coordinator and Assistant Product Manager on scope, priorities, and timelines.
- Foster clear communication across engineering, QA, and product to align priorities and resolve blockers efficiently.

Minimum Qualifications

Required

- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
- Seven or more years of application development experience, including two or more years in a leadership capacity.
- Experience producing and operating web-based applications using modern cloud-based architectures.
- Expertise with the current application technology stack, or similar experience with an eagerness to learn: PostgreSQL, Rust, GraphQL, AWS (EC2, Lambda, S3, Cognito, Amplify), GitHub Actions, Terraform, Nix, Terranix, and NixOS.
- Experience with relational database backup, restore, and disaster-recovery practices, including pg_dump/pg_restore, automated backup scheduling, and schema-migration tooling.
- Proven ability to balance leadership responsibilities with active, hands-on development and infrastructure work.
- Experience leading Agile/Scrum teams in the role of Scrum Master, Product Owner, or development lead.
- Experience leading application development efforts while ensuring delivery quality, scalability, and maintainability.
- Strong understanding of software design principles, system architecture, and performance optimization.
- Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to influence across disciplines.
- Curiosity about Indigenous languages and a desire to help them thrive.

Preferred

- Experience leading the development of one or more successful web applications serving a variety of communities and users.
- Familiarity with event-driven architectures or microservices.
- Experience or familiarity with product management, human-centered design, and a community/end-user focus.
- Experience designing CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure-as-code automation using tools such as GitHub Actions workflows, Terraform, and Nix.
- Familiarity with network and infrastructure security concepts, including virtual private cloud (VPC) routing, bastion hosts, security groups, and Amazon Machine Image (AMI) management.
- Passion for technical mentorship and continuous improvement.
- Experience or interest in Community-Centered Design, Human-Centered Design, and Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, and Ethics (CARE) Principles for Indigenous Data Governance.

Position Type

Information Technology

Additional Information

Northeastern University considers factors such as candidate work experience, education and skills when extending an offer.

Northeastern has a comprehensive benefits package for benefit eligible employees. This includes medical, vision, dental, paid time off, tuition assistance, wellness & life, retirement- as well as commuting & transportation. Visit https://hr.northeastern.edu/benefits/ for more information.

All qualified applicants are encouraged to apply and will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, religion, color, national origin, age, sex, sexual orientation, disability status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.

Compensation Grade/Pay Type:
113S

Expected Hiring Range:
$113,865.00 - $165,105.00

With the pay range(s) shown above, the starting salary will depend on several factors, which may include your education, experience, location, knowledge and expertise, and skills as well as a pay comparison to similarly-situated employees already in the role. Salary ranges are reviewed regularly and are subject to change.