Inquirium is looking for a freelance developer to build out the front-end of a site that will help principals and school districts determine how well their schools are producing high school and college graduates. The site is based on ground-breaking research data that provides insight into the various obstacles that students face on the way to graduation. Our mission is to help school stakeholders make sense of this data in ways that leads to better outcomes for their students and their schools.

Inquirium is a three-person company celebrating our fourteenth year of successfully designing and developing educational software and web applications for museums, zoos, schools, and other non-profits.

We are hiring a front-end developer who can work with a visual designer to implement interfaces that allow users to explore and visualize school data in interesting, useful ways. This position is primarily focused on front-end work, with some collaboration with a back-end developer to nail down a RESTish API for retrieving school data.

The initial commitment is a half-time position through the end of 2014. However, there is the potential for ongoing work with this project in 2015, as well as work on other Inquirium projects.

Here’s who we’re looking for:

You enjoy iterative design and working in small teams. At the same time, you can work independently, stay on schedule, and don’t need a lot of hand holding to get the job done.

You’re comfortable working with modern Javascript frameworks like Backbone, Angular or Ember, and with tooling like Grunt and Bower. You’ve built web interactives before, whether as one-offs on a page, or as full-blown single-page applications. You know how to talk to REST (and non-REST) services.

You may not be test-driven, but you understand what testing buys you and use tests when appropriate. You’ve worked with complex web sites long enough to understand their maintenance challenges and be proactive about addressing those challenges.

You have experience working in languages other than Javascript. While your primary responsibilities will focus on front-end development, familiarity with back-end technologies like Django, Node.js, or Go are a plus and may come into play in other projects.

Another thing that’s important is your ability to work and communicate remotely with folks in different time zones. We are a distributed company, with key staff in time zones across the US. We rely heavily on online tools for talking, sharing design materials, and providing feedback. Our approach is to schedule a meeting, send an artifact ahead of time with specific feedback requests, meet to discuss, then work independently on follow-up action items. Since much of our communication is asynchronous, your ability to write clearly and well is important.

If you’re interested in this job, contact us at jobs@inquirium.net and convince us that you’re the one!