Early Career Full Stack Developer

RTI International is one of the world's leading research institutes, dedicated to improving the human condition by turning knowledge into practice. Our staff of nearly 6,000 provides research and technical services to governments and businesses in more than 75 countries in the areas of health and pharmaceuticals, education and training, surveys and statistics, advanced technology, international development, economic and social policy, energy and the environment, and laboratory testing and chemical analysis.

The Center for Data Science and AI at RTI International is seeking an Early Career Full Stack Developer with experience in modern open-source frameworks for building data applications. The ideal candidate will have experience with general software development and be interested in applying that expertise to data-driven applications, which will typically involve some combination of web development, data engineering, data visualization, and advanced analytics (machine learning, AI, NLP, simulation modeling) in service of operationalizing data science tools in a variety of domains. The successful candidate will be comfortable working with a growing team of data scientists, software developers, and domain experts to design, prototype, and deploy web-based analytic and data visualization solutions across a wide variety of fast-moving projects.

RTI is one of the nation’s largest independent, nonprofit scientific research organizations with a mission is to improve the human condition. Furthermore, our Center’s mission is to apply “data science for social good”, by combining modern software development with data science in the domains of public health, justice, public safety, survey science, engineering, education, and the environment. A successful candidate will work with a thriving team of 30+ data scientists, software developers, visual designers, as well as subject matter experts, solving important national problems, improving our local communities, and transforming research.

Our goal is to solve problems for and with people, informing decision-making through collaboration, innovation, and technical expertise.

• Collaborate with and grow under senior developers as a mentee.
• Participate in meetings with clients, assist in and lead the framing of projects and designing of solutions based on client needs and problems to be solved.
• Collect, clean, store, organize, and integrate data, and create data pipelines that are part of technical solutions.
• Collaborate with teams of data scientists, computer scientists, and subject matter experts to solve problems across the spectrum of domains at RTI.
• Participate as an active member in teams building web-based data products, typically using JavaScript and/or Python.
• Deploy web applications to cloud services using best practices such as containerization.
• Communicate results through web-based applications, presentations, blog posts, peer-reviewed publications, and contributions to open-source projects.
• Develop infrastructure and automation around data tools.

• Experience with data ETL processes (e.g., SQL queries, reading flat files (CSV/JSON), data cleaning).
• Degree (bachelors) in computer science or other computational science and 1-3 years of relevant experience (or relevant internships in lieu of years of experience).
• Experience with web development in a Python environment (FastAPI, Django, Flask) or an MVC framework in another language.
• Strong interpersonal and collaboration skills, including oral and written communication and presentations as evidenced by personal website, publications, blog posts, or cover letter.
• To qualify, applicants must be legally authorized to work in the United States and should not require now, or in the future, sponsorship for employment visa status.
• Experience with modern frontend web development in frameworks like Vue, React or Angular

Desired Skills/Experience:

• Familiarity with popular data science libraries in Python such as Pandas and NumPy
• Familiarity with relational/SQL databases, including any of these: MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite.
• Familiarity/experience with modern web frameworks (frontend and backend). Our stack frequently includes Vue, Django, Flask and FastAPI
• Familiarity with cloud infrastructure such as AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.
• Collaborative software development experience, including familiarity with version control, testing, code reviews, and/or Agile software development.
• Ability to learn new open-source software quickly in the ever-changing world of web and data software development.
• Experience navigating and scripting in a Unix command line environment.
• Familiarity with popular frontend visualization libraries like D3, Highcharts, Chart.js
• Willingness to obtain low-risk federal government clearance(s) for access to sensitive data.
• Ability to access, extract, integrate, and automate data from a wide variety of sources (e.g., relational databases, text and unstructured data, sensor data, social media data, image and video data, streaming data).
• Familiarity with containerization technologies (Docker, Kubernetes).