Software Engineer

About Internet Archive and the Open Staffing Foundation
Internet Archive is a non-profit library, headquartered in San Francisco, with an ambitious mission: to provide "Universal Access to All Knowledge" - the books, web pages, audio, television and software of our shared human culture. Our 150 team members have built one of the top 300 websites in the world, The Internet Archive digitizes thousands of books a day and collects a hundred million web pages a week. In its 25+ years, it has built one of the largest digital libraries in the world by working with hundreds of national and international libraries, archives, museums, universities, and non-profits.

Open Staffing Foundation (OSF) is a nonprofit that provides staffing services for the Internet Archive and other mission aligned organizations.


Job Summary

This role works in the Archiving & Data Services group and applies software engineering and DevOps practices as part of the engineering team. The Software Engineer helps to grow the Archiving & Data Services group's suite of digital archiving, data, and access products and services for a global set of partner research, government, memory, and social good organizations. The role supports values-aligned products, at petabyte scale, run in our self-owned and operated data centers, and helps ensure preservation and access to digital information for a global coalition of institutions.

The successful candidate will engage in significant time overlaps with North America staff and Pacific Time Zone. The candidate must be able to attend some in-person team meetings (generally two in-person meetings per year). The role is open to US-based candidates authorized to work in the United States.

Essential Duties & Responsibilities

• Lead projects across the full software development lifecycle: plan, design, implement, test, deploy, and maintain software solutions.
• Evolve system architectures and services to support future requirements, improve reliability, and reduce operational burden.
• Help plan and execute a migration of the team's deployment from Ansible-based VM deployments to Kubernetes and ArgoCD-based deployments.
• Triage, resolve, and address root causes of production issues.
• Support engineering leadership with project coordination, strategic planning, and operational execution.
• Support the development, deployment, and operations of SaaS web applications, public search and discovery websites, and web crawling and playback operations.
• Build and improve foundational systems, services, and developer tools.
• Foster a culture of collaboration and learning, reinforce team processes that are working, and identify potential technology or workflow improvements.

Competencies to Succeed in the Role

• Commitment to the Archive's mission to provide "Universal Access to All Knowledge."
• Understanding of how to work well with a distributed team with diverse skills and willingness to collaborate, share information, and be open to learning from others.
• Ability to own production systems end to end (design, implementation, deployment, monitoring, and continuous improvement).
• Understanding of web protocols and how they interact with browsers, with the goal of enhancing both application delivery as well as web archiving and playback.

Education and Experience

• Required: Five (5)+ years of experience as a Software Engineer focused on DevOps, operations, and backend engineering.
• Required: Experience with, or ability to learn, core technologies in use in the department, including Python, Django, Postgres, and Elasticsearch.
• Preferred: Experience with Kubernetes in production environments and migrating to Kubernetes-based deployments.
• Preferred: Technical leadership experience (mentoring, leading projects, design review)

Benefits & Perks

Internet Archive works with Open Staffing Foundation to recruit, hire and retain staff. Open Staffing Foundation offers a comprehensive benefits package, including PTO, paid holidays, medical, dental, and vision benefits, health savings and flexible spending accounts, commuter benefits, short-term and long-term disability coverage, and retirement programs.


At the Open Staffing Foundation, we believe our best work happens when diverse perspectives come together. We strongly encourage applications from individuals in groups underrepresented in the tech and library industries. We are proud to be an equal-opportunity employer, committed to fair employment practices regardless of race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex, marital status, ancestry, disability, genetic information, veteran status, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local law.

We also aspire to make the online job application process accessible to any and all users. If you have a disability that impacts your ability to complete the application process, and would like to request assistance or accommodation, please contact us: View email address on click.appcast.io

Lastly, pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.