Job Summary/Basic Function:
The Digital Futures Institute at Teachers College Columbia University was created in 2020 in response to the explosive growth of media and technology in education. The Institute fulfills the dual mandate of providing media and technology services to the Teachers College community and developing and researching the use of media and technology in education. DFI brings together experts in educational technology, media production, instructional design and innovative use of physical space to develop impactful and playful educational experiences.

The Digital Futures Institute at Teachers College Columbia University seeks a backend developer with Salesforce, REST API and SQL experience. The backend developer will support the administrative and research functions of the Digital Futures Institute by gathering data from multiple sources, organizing and managing databases. The developer is responsible for coordinating the creation of systems to manage the flow of data between applications in support of the overall mission of the Digital Futures Institute. This position is responsible for ensuring data gathered in various systems is appropriate and the configuration of these systems is coordinated to provide for efficient and effective operation.

Required Skills:

General

• Experience in the full application life cycle from technical design to development, testing, and deployment
• Audit system performance and gather user feedback
• Troubleshoot complex technical issues for academic platforms
• Experience troubleshooting and fixing bugs or faults in programming

API

• Using Web APIs to automate and integrate systems
• Experience with Single Sign On, Partner API & Enterprise API
• Experience with educational and education-adjacent products such as Canvas, Zoom, YuJa
• Provide direction for API reference documentation and usability
• Experience in software development and coding to API's across a range of languages and frameworks=
• Combine data from multiple data sources

SQL

• Database administrator for both academic and research data
• Access and update tables, views, stored procedures, etc.
• Data migration
• Managing imports of data from third-party vendors
• Create data summary reports
• Explore ways to enhance data quality and reliability
• Work with users and stakeholders to gather functional and technical requirements around digital asset metadata, taxonomy, organization, and workflow
• Organize and create efficient metadata structures, taxonomies, and file-naming conventions\
• Assign appropriate metadata to assets, archive and delete assets as necessary, create curated groups of assets for end users as needed

Salesforce

• Experience with Salesforce product suite including:
• Salesforce Administration and Configuration Experience (Sites, Security, CORS, Connected Apps, etc.)
• Salesforce Sandboxes, Integrations and Application Development
• Salesforce Data Loader
• Experience working with integrating 3rd party systems with Salesforce

Minimum Qualifications:

• A Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field
• 5+ years of progressive work experience with demonstrated expertise in the higher education sector and environments with complex enterprise architecture
• Experience in cloud services. Ideally AWS services such as EMR, Glue, Athena, RDS and Redshift
• Outstanding attention to detail
• Strong organization skills
• Great numerical and analytical skills
• Excellent verbal, written, and visual presentation skills
• Excellent problem-solving skills
• Demonstrable skills in APIs
• Demonstrable experience with SQL
• Understanding of different data generation processes and pipelines, including for media, log files
• Deep, hands-on programming experience, preferably in complex enterprise systems
• The ability to recognize structural issues within the organization, functional inter dependencies and provide a technical impact assessment

Preferred Qualifications:

• Previous analytics experience
• Experience with HIPAA and FERPA compliance
• Salesforce certification
• Understand rights management and archival issues and configure policies to address current and future needs
• Experience working with geographically separate project teams
• Fanatical about creating order from disorder
• Outstanding attention to detail
• Ability to apply sound judgment while working independently

About Teachers College, Columbia University

Teachers College, Columbia University, is the oldest and largest graduate school of education in the United States, and also perennially ranked among the nation's best. Its name notwithstanding, the College is committed to a vision of education writ large, encompassing our four core areas of expertise: health, education, leadership and psychology.

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