Software Engineer, Bloomberg Digital Accelerator

Job Description

About Us
We are a world-class visitor attraction and leading science research centre. We use the Museum's unique collections and our unrivalled expertise to tackle the biggest challenges facing the world today. We care for more than 80 million objects spanning billions of years and welcome more than five million visitors annually and 16 million visits to our website.

Today the Museum is more relevant and influential than ever. By attracting people from a range of backgrounds to work for us, we can continue to look at the world with fresh eyes and find new ways of doing things.

We employ 900 staff in a variety of roles, all united by our vision of a future where people and planet thrive. We need everyone to have the passion and drive to help us with our mission to create advocates for our planet and inspire millions to care about the natural world.

Diversity and inclusion matter to us.

Our vision is of a future where both people and the planet thrive. Diversity is one of our core values and we strive to build a workplace where everyone feels a sense of belonging. All new staff who join us learn about the importance of diversity and inclusion to the Museum and how to contribute to creating an inclusive environment.

We know we have more to do, but we are committed to ensuring that everyone who works at the Museum feels they can thrive and feel valued and respected.

About the role

T he Museum has recently received funding from Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Digital Accelerator for Arts and Culture, which supports arts organisations through strategic improvements to technology infrastructure. This funding will help us scale up our mass digitisation capabilities in preparation for DiSSCo UK, a £155 million, 10-year programme to digitise natural science collections held in the UK.

We are looking for an experienced software engineer to develop a web app for our Join the Dots (JtD) program. JtD is a cross–disciplinary collections assessment framework which the Museum applies to its collections, encompassing all the material managed by its Life Sciences, Earth Sciences, and Library & Archives departments. The framework captures information across four assessment categories: Condition, Importance, Information, and Outreach to provide an overview of the collections from which wider decision making can occur. The data gathered by the JtD program is critical to the management and care of the Museum’s collections. This is particularly important in the context of other important Museum programs including moving 28 million specimens to a new collections and research centre, building a new collections management system, and DiSSCo UK.

You will be responsible for creating a service to work with JtD data. This service is envisaged as an internal web app allowing data entry and modification by collections staff, as well as providing reporting APIs for Power BI dashboards used by stakeholders. It is expected that this service will make use of the Latimer Core (LtC) data standard, allowing interoperability with the Museum’s Collections Management System (CMS) as well as external community systems like GBIF’s Global Registry of Scientific Collections (GRSciColl). The developed service will be open source allowing the opportunity for community use by other institutions or organisations, such as DiSSCo UK.

This role sits within the Digital, Data and Informatics (DDI) group within our Science department. DDI is responsible for the museum’s mass digitisation, collections data management, scientific AI applications, and the delivery of DiSSCo UK. You will report to the Head of Science Data Platforms.

About you

The succesful candidate will have significant and demostrable experience as a full stack developer, working on both backend APIs as well as modern frontend web applications. They will be able to demonstrate experience in developing websites or applications and a good understanding of designing and building for user needs as well as managing the full software development lifecycle, including requirements gathering, design work, and user testing, as well as the implementation.

You will also have exprience designing and building web applications with Vue.js and Vite and web services using Python, specifically Flask or FastAPI as well as complex relational data models with PostgreSQL or MySQL

If this sounds like you, please download the full job descirption and apply to join out amazing team!

Thriving at the Museum: the way we work

We are proud to work at the Museum and have identified the qualities we all need to embody to reach our shared ambition. This sits alongside the Museum’s values and forms the framework for the way we work.

Find out more here

What we offer

• 27.5 days holiday plus 8 bank holidays (full time equivalent)
• Generous defined contribution Natural History Museum Pension Scheme (employer contribution 4 - 10%)
• Season ticket, bicycle and rental loan
• Life insurance
• Free admission to our exhibitions and many other paid exhibitions at museums, galleries and institutions across London and the UK.
• Staff discount at our Museum shops and cafes
• We offer a wide variety of training initiatives and opportunities to build skills. Investing in staff development is important to us, and we are ambitious about helping staff to grow and fulfil their potential.
• Affordable membership to the Civil Service Sports Council which offers a range of benefits including an extensive list of special offers and reduced entry fees at a selection of cinema chains, theme parks, theatres, retailers and supermarkets. It also provides entry to up to 300 English Heritage sites and other national treasures. For more details, visit https://www.cssc.co.uk
• Membership to our Sports and Social Association (for a small fee), which includes access to our in-house gym and clubs such as football, softball, table tennis and tennis and classes in Middle Eastern dance, yoga and Tai Chi