iNaturalist Systems architect

"To do this, we need your help to keep iNaturalist’s infrastructure scaling. We’d like to start by offering a 5-month contract to help research, design, and implement improvements or alternatives to help iNaturalist’s core infrastructure, such as our search functionality, to perform at larger scales. We expect to hire a full-time systems architect at the end of the contract period. Depending on the applicant, there may be a possibility to transition from one role to another. POSITION SUMMARY: The systems architect will work alongside our team of five other developers including the member of our team chiefly responsible for dev-ops. The work can be done remotely, but the position will require working closely with the iNaturalist team through weekly iteration meetings and daily Slack and Github communication. The work will require forking and setting up local instances of the iNaturalist infrastructure, implementing changes to the infrastructure, testing at production scales, and helping apply changes to iNaturalist’s production systems. More specifically, we’re looking for someone with experience and ideas to try in order to ensure that iNaturalist users continue to receive fast responses to search queries at larger scales, and will do the work to implement and test these improvements. Search functionality is core to iNaturalist and impacts the response time of most parts of the platform and most new features we have planned. Our goal at the end of this contract is to have an implementation that either performs better than our current system at our current scale, or performs as good as our current system at larger scales...."