Senior Full Stack Developer (Remote Consultancy)

Senior Full Stack Developer (Remote Consultancy)

Founded in 2012, the Syria Justice and Accountability Centre (SJAC) is a nonprofit dedicated to promoting meaningful justice for Syria. Bayanat is SJAC's open-source data management platform for storing and analyzing evidence of human rights violations. It is deployed by SJAC and partner organizations to manage media-intensive, sensitive, bilingual (Arabic/English) datasets at scale.

Senior developers are core contributors to Bayanat's roadmap and own features end-to-end across backend, frontend, data, security, and deployment. SJAC operates as an agile, mission-driven team with close collaboration between developers, analysts, and end-users at SJAC and partner organizations.

SJAC anticipates issuing a year-long consultancy, approximately 160 hours per month, with options for renewal.

Scope of Work

• Design, build, and maintain backend services using a Python web framework (Flask) and asynchronous task processing.
• Build and maintain modern JavaScript frontends (Vue), including bilingual (Arabic/English) interfaces.
• Design and ship database schema changes on a live production database, including data migrations.
• Integrate with third-party APIs and services, including object storage, mapping, media platforms, and AI/LLM providers.
• Own deployment and operations on Linux: containerized services, reverse proxies, application servers, centralized logging and metrics, backups, and incident response.
• Configure and maintain secure infrastructure: secure remote access, edge tunnels, TLS, and network segmentation between services.
• Lead and respond to application security work, including dependency management, authentication hardening, data protection (encryption at rest and in transit), and remediation of findings from external security assessments.
• Improve application performance and scalability through profiling, query optimization, and architectural changes.
• Build and maintain data ingestion pipelines from diverse and sometimes adversarial sources.
• Participate in code reviews, mentor other contributors, and produce design documents, runbooks, and release notes.
• Support end-users and partner deployments: troubleshoot issues, run demos, and contribute to usability and rollout efforts.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Management, Computer Engineering, or related field. Significant equivalent experience accepted in lieu of a formal degree.
• At least five years of professional web development experience, with substantial recent work in Python (Flask or Django) and JavaScript (Vue or React).
• Strong experience with PostgreSQL, Redis, task queues (e.g., Celery), Nginx, Docker, and Git.
• Demonstrated experience designing and shipping schema migrations on a live production database.
• Demonstrated experience with web application security, including OWASP Top 10 mitigations, authentication, and dependency vulnerability management.
• Strong understanding of web architecture: REST APIs, background job processing, caching, and observability.
• Excellent written and verbal communication in English and Arabic.
• Strong work ethic, accuracy, and ability to handle confidential information responsibly.
• Ability to work independently and as part of a distributed team across time zones, with sensitivity to working with vulnerable communities.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience integrating AI/LLM services into production applications (e.g., document analysis, OCR, semantic search).
• Experience building resilient data ingestion or web-scraping pipelines.
• Experience with full-text and multilingual search.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and automated release tooling.
• Experience deploying to multiple cloud providers and to bare-metal Linux servers.
• Exposure to human rights, transitional justice, or open-source civic tech work.

SJAC is a diverse organization made up of 40+ team members around the globe. We pride ourselves in our ability to implement programming that is inclusive and responsive to the needs of all Syrians, and we believe our team's diversity helps us achieve that goal. We encourage all interested applicants to apply, regardless of race, religion, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, or age.

To apply, please submit a resume and cover letter by email to hiring[@]syriaaccountability[.]org using the subject line "Senior Full Stack Developer – [your name]". Include a proposed hourly rate in your cover letter. Applications are accepted on a rolling basis until a Preferred Vendor list is established.