CUNY Academic Commons

Hi all,

There\’s a position currently advertised at the Whitney Museum of American Art that sounds like a position that may be of interest. Even if you\’re not ready for a position like this quite yet, the job posting offers a very interesting breakdown in the kinds of skills that museums may be looking for in a technologist. Here\’s the direct link: https://whitney.org/About/JobPostings/SeniorCreativeTechnologist.

Best wishes,

Lisa

Reporting to the Director of Digital Media, the Senior Creative Technologist is responsible for technological development and support of the Museum’s digital systems.

About the Team

The Digital Media department is responsible for investigating and harnessing new storytelling techniques and technologies to deliver on the Museum’s mission to engage audiences where-ever they are, and create impactful Whitney experiences. The Senior Creative Technologist works closely with the Director of Digital Media and the Whitney’s web developer on product strategy and development, and leads an agile process to develop and deliver products.

About the Role

As the Senior Creative Technologist, you will oversee the Museum’s digital eco-systems. You are skilled in creating and communicating a vision: you will often lead from the start on projects, explore new models and determine the right approach while cutting through entrenched processes. You are a team player working closely with the museum’s web developer on all development strategy, as well as day to day implementation.

Responsibilities

• Evolve and maintain our digital systems
• Develop tools and frameworks to enable our digital team to build rich storytelling experiences and intuitive e-commerce flows
• Collaborate across departments to define roadmaps and prioritization, and work with outside vendors
• Provide technical support to systems that support the public website, membership, online retail, online ticketing, museum collections, and internal websites
• Consult on museum-wide systems integration projects as they relate to public-facing and internal-facing products
• Recommend and implement standards, evaluate functional design, and test usability and compliance
• Work with the Museum’s internal design department on product development
• Manage performance and reliability of systems
• Keep systems and workflows well documented
• Conduct R&D on emerging technologies, eg. AR and image recognition

Requirements

• 5+ years’ experience maintaining and developing websites
• Creative thinker with a keen eye for clean user interface design and implementation, and deep knowledge of web development best practices.
• Good organizational skills, attention to detail, and strong QA skills
• Excellent verbal, written, and interpersonal communication skills, including the ability to relay technical concepts to non-technical audiences
• Fluent in one or more scripting languages, preferably Ruby
• Fluent in JavaScript, and up-to-date with ES6 and modern JS tools
• Proficient in CSS, and preferably SASS
• Experience testing and troubleshooting browser compatibility
• Know how to install and maintain relational databases
• Strong background in managing and deploying Linux-based web server environments
• Familiarity with version control systems and workflows
• Familiar with maintaining WordPress and Drupal sites
• Experience with accessibility best practices (WCAG 2.0 standards)
• Interested in contemporary art

Whitney’s Technology

Our main website was built in-house on Ruby on Rails 5, with a MySQL database, SASS, JavaScript ES6, webpack, runs within Docker on Linux servers, and is served through NGINX. It integrates with several other systems and API’s using JSON and XML. Some of our other sites are built in Python (Django), Drupal 7, and WordPress, and run on Apache. Everything is versioned through Git.