Digital Preservation Coalition

Vacancy at The National Archives: Development Lead for Digital Records Infrastructure

Lead Developer Digital Records Infrstructure
Salary: £40-45,000
Location: London
Postition Type: Full time, permanent
Closing Date: 31st May 2013

Are you seeking to build a career in a world-leading institution using your skills and experience in software development to preserve a nation’s history? Building on our award-winning experience in digital preservation, The National Archives is developing a new Digital Records Infrastructure (DRI) system to acquire, store and preserve our rapidly increasing digital collection. Operating at petabyte-scale, this system will ensure the long-term preservation of the UK government’s records. Records such as government websites, the records of significant public inquiries, the decisions and deliberation of senior officials, ministers and prime ministers and the nations digitised history from the 10th to the early 21st century are all to be preserved in the system.

As the Development Lead for the DRI, you will play a key role in the delivery of this innovative and high-profile system, ensuring that it remains capable of handling the latest digital records as new record formats are presented to the archives for permanent preservation. The current system comprises a series of batch-processing workflows constructed predominantly in Java, XSLT, XML Schema and Bash script running in a Red Hat Enterprise Linux environment. You will influence the future technical design of the system and be responsible for setting the technical direction and tasks of the team, mentoring staff, undertaking code review and also writing code yourself. You must be an expert in at least one or more programming languages, with a good level of knowledge of others. A concrete understanding of TCP/IP networking and Linux systems would be an advantage.

You should be passionate about both technology and information management. Your creativity and experience will be essential to the organisation to inform and shape the design of new workflows that you will need to translate into efficient operational code. You will liaise with Heads of Department, technical staff throughout the Technology Directorate, and colleagues across The National Archives and beyond; the role will be varied and challenging.

For more information see: http://bit.ly/YWaing