No longer current - The position has been filled
DaSCH, the Swiss National Data & Service Centre for the Humanities, is a national research infrastructure and long-term archive (repository) for research data in the humanities. This concerns disciplines such as archaeology, history, art history, philosophy or history of science. DaSCH is affiliated with the University of Basel. We are a dynamic team with a broad knowledge and working with the most modern technologies. All software created at DaSCH is open source. We actively participate in the open source community. As a Senior Scala Backend Engineer you will join a very talented team of individuals who have learned to work together extremely well. You are passionate and self-motivated, with enthusiasm about Scala and its ecosystem, willing to participate in the usual software engineering activities and work closely with other engineers, product management, and the rest of the team. You are open to new ideas and challenges and prefer to work incrementally, with attention to detail and delivery. You champion teamwork and respect majority decisions. We use Scala for the backend of our DaSCH Service Platform. We build applications for the web (Desktop and Mobile). Our infrastructure is currently defined in Ansible; we are experimenting with Nomad for orchestrating our services. We have an automated test suite, and we are applying continuous integration (CI) practices. All our software is open source and on Github (https://github.com/dasch-swiss)
Your position
Design and implement features
Review contributions from other engineers
Analyze requirements, break down work, and help prioritize it
Plan for incremental software development
Deliver according to agile best practices
Communicate and analyze technical details.
Collaborate with Product Management and other stakeholders within the DaSCH to maintain a high bar for quality in a fast-paced, iterative environment
Craft code that meets our internal standards for style, maintainability, and best practices for a high-scale web environment. Maintain and advocate for these standards through code review.
Advocate for improvements to product quality, security, and performance that have particular impact across your team.
Solve technical problems of high scope and complexity.
Exert influence on the overall objectives and long-range goals of your team.
Experience with performance and optimization problems, particularly at large scale, and a demonstrated ability to both diagnose and prevent these problems.
Assuring quality of your code with unit, property, and integration tests
Provide mentorship for Junior and Intermediate Engineers on your team to help them grow in their technical responsibilities and remove blockers to their autonomy.
Confidently ship moderately sized features and improvements with minimal guidance and support from other team members. Collaborate with the team on larger issues.
Your profile
A minimum of 3-5 years development experience (professional or otherwise) in functional Scala.
Proficiency in the German and/or English language, both written and verbal, sufficient for success in a semi-remote work environment.
Demonstrated capacity to clearly and concisely communicate about complex technical, architectural, and/or organizational problems and propose thorough iterative solutions.
Comfort working in a highly agile, intensely iterative software development process.
Demonstrated ability to onboard and integrate with an organization long-term.
Positive and solution-oriented mindset.
An inclination towards communication, inclusion, and visibility.
Self-motivated and self-managing, with excellent organizational skills.
Demonstrated ability to work closely with other parts of the organization.
Share our values, and work in accordance with those values.
Experience working with Git and Git workflow
Practical experience with Agile software development methods
Knowledge of functional and object-oriented programming paradigms
Skills relevant for a software engineer specialized in Scala
Advanced knowledge of the Scala type system.
Akka-Http, ZIO ecosystem, testcontainers, Docker, Semantic Web Technologies (RDF/SPARQL)
Likable personality with soft skills
Analytical, synthetic, and scientific thinking.
Nice to haves
Frontend experience including Elm preferred.
Product company experience
Experience working with a global or otherwise multicultural team
Computer science education or equivalent experience
Passionate about/experienced with open source and developer tools
We offer you The 80 - 100 % position is initially limited until 31 December 2025. We offer you an attractive working environment in a digital national research infrastructure where you can contribute and realize your ideas. The position is available immediately.
Application / Contact
Please send your complete application documents to Daniela Meier (daniela.meier@dasch.swiss).