UX/UI/Web/Data developpers open positions at Harvard CID

[Romain Vuillemot]

Harvard Center for International Development - Onsite in Cambridge, MA (Next to Boston)
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https://github.com/cid-harvard/job-descriptions

* UX/UI Developer (VISA)
* Web Developer (VISA)
* Data and API Developer (VISA)
* Web Development INTERNS 


What we do
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We take real world government data and research, and turn them into interactive data viz tools. The Atlas of Economic Complexity is our current online tool that lets you interactively visualize a country’s trade and explore growth opportunities for more than a hundred countries worldwide. There are also other National Atlas projects launching soon, one for Colombia and one for Mexico.

The idea is that countries provide us with their data and the Center provides them with economic policy advice based on our economic theories, and an interactive tool to explore their situation and make sound policy decisions at the regional level. If you're looking for a high-impact job, this is it!

What we want to do
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We want to focus on building features around this idea of storytelling with data (see example at the end), as well as improve our UI and design to be cleaner and up to modern standards, and to add better visualization capabilities. We look at NYtimes / WaPo data driven articles with envy. We salivate when we see Tufte's work (ok some of us debate that). We constantly run usability tests and we work to evangelize user-centric design and iterative development within the Center and with our partners in government.
We need you, passionate UX thinker and desigher or you, dear frontend engineer, to help make all that a reality!


Our stack
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We use python, django, mysql (hopefully postgres soon), elasticsearch, ansible for the back end. For the frontend, it's ember / d3 on big national projects, jquery/d3 on atlas.cid.harvard.edu/ and WebGL with Three.js on some 3d projects that we’ve launched such as globe.cid.harvard.edu/
Everything we do is open source: https://github.com/cid-harvard


Work environment
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We're a small engineering team inside the Harvard Growth Lab, working with a large group of brilliant researchers who tackle the problem of inclusive economic growth from diverse backgrounds like econ, public policy, physics, and international development.

As engineers our past work ranges from software startups, to electoral campaign data teams, to PHDs in computer science. Working here we get to see all parts of the process, from meetings with high levels of government, to data analysis to real world applications using our tools. We also attend cool small group talks from interesting people visiting at Harvard.

We can't hire anyone fully remote, but we have a lot of flexibility in terms of working remotely some days per week or parts of the year. 


Demo of the current atlas
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An example of how the atlas is useful take this story here:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/03/21/world/europe/how-much-europe-depends-on-russian-energy.html

Last year the EU placed sanctions on sales of oil equipment, but not on oil imports. Why could this be? Almost 70% of russia's exports are petrol products:
http://atlas.cid.harvard.edu/explore/tree_map/export/rus/all/show/2013/

And Russia exports the overwhelming majority of its petroleum products to Europe:

http://atlas.cid.harvard.edu/explore/tree_map/export/rus/show/2709/2013/ 
and 
http://atlas.cid.harvard.edu/explore/tree_map/export/rus/show/2710/2013/

The big blue chunk is europe, meaning a sanction would really hurt Russia. However, when you look at who else the EU could buy from, the situation is grim:
http://atlas.cid.harvard.edu/explore/tree_map/net_export/show/all/2709/2013/

There’s practically no one who’s a real political ally that Europe could depend on, save for Norway. It’s interesting how it’s practically impossible to buy oil from a country that’s relatively stable and doing well on the HDI front. 

It’s worse if you consider the cost of transporting it, and how close Russia is:
http://atlas.cid.harvard.edu/explore/map/net_export/show/all/2709/2013/

Which probably explains why EU hasn't placed sanctions on oil imports from Russia.


Talk to us
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We'd love to hear more about you and see work samples if possible! To get in touch: greg underscore shapiro at hks dot harvard dot edu.