Are you looking for smart colleagues, meaningful projects, and fresh technology challenges? mySociety is a community of coders and technology fiends using our talents to make the world a better place.

We do this by building useful, high impact, democratic open source web apps likeFixMyStreet.com, WhatDoTheyKnow.com and TheyWorkForYou.com, and running projects, such as Alaveteli.org, to help people run tools like these around the world.

We’re hiring open-source-savvy web developers in order to grow our international impact, help us sustain ourselves through commercial work, and increase our reach in the UK.

Why you should work with us

We are a top drawer software development team, and we get to work on stuff that matters. Our sites and projects help people to get important things done: holding politicians to account, extracting information from government, and getting streetlights fixed. And as a mySociety developer you can see the benefits and talk to the users, every day.

We’re looking for new developers who will be comfortable working on both charitable and commercial projects, for clients who vary from volunteers (asking for new features) through to big media company clients with high expectations of professionalism.

We’re not dogmatic about languages: if you can work in any of Ruby, Python or Perl you’ll be at home here – we’ll find an interesting project for you. We love Django and Rails, and we’re having fun experimenting with Node.js, canvas, and more.

We’re widely geographically dispersed, and a lot of people work from home (although we’re setting up a central London office too). There is a high expectation of self-direction and self-discipline; our project management style aims to minimize pain and distraction, and leave people to get on with doing great work. If you prefer to work in groups, that’s fine, and if you like to plug away on your own, we’ll work to give you projects where that suits too.

You’ll also be collaborating with some amazing volunteers who are incredibly skilled and dedicated in their own right. Being part of mySociety means being in the kind of organisation that is so motivated that the management’s job is often to tell people to take it easy. We welcome people who, deep down, burn to make a difference.

Here’s the minimum skills we need you to have:

• A broad range of front and back end experience in open source languages. You should be able to take a project from design to execution, covering everything in between. Our current main projects are in PHP, Python, Ruby, Perl and node.js.
• Experience in working with open source databases (such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB).
• The ability to write clean, maintainable front end HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
• A pragmatic approach to automated testing.

Experience:

• You should have autonomously conceived, designed and built at least one interactive website or app of some kind, running it for extended periods.
• It would also help if you have maintained open source tools that are re-used by others.

As a person, we hope you will be:

• Friendly and motivated
• Creative and lateral thinking
• Keen to learn and master new developments in technology
• Able to balance technical pragmatism and technical purism
• Good at managing your own time and avoiding distractions
• Aware and realistic about your own strengths and weakness
• The sort of person who has passions beyond coding

What mySociety is

We are a social enterprise, which means that despite our charitable status, we also operate as a business. We fund 50% of our charitable work through the delivery of world class web development services, particularly to government and major media companies, from Channel 4 to the World Bank. The great thing about being a social enterprise is that we get to play in both fields, and have a wider range of impacts.

Location

Anywhere in the United Kingdom. We have an office in Central London, and we need you to be willing to travel there up to 12 times a year.

Salary & Benefits

£38-45k plus pension (3% employer contribution, 5% employee). You will be a full PAYE employee.

Deadlines and Dates

The application deadline is 9am on 19th June 2012, and interviews will be on the 3rd July 2012, in London, or via Skype if travel is problematic.

No recruiters or agencies, please.