Senior Developer

This job is interesting because...

• Universities face a huge challenge managing research programmes worth billions to the UK economy. Software in this area is in its infancy with many aspects of research administration still being undertaken using spreadsheets and manual processes. Research administration ranges from helping researchers with funding applications, tracking research income, ensuring research projects undergo proper ethical consideration to protect universities and researchers, and managing the publication of research outputs in open access repositories to comply with funder requirements and make research widely available for the benefit of the public and other researchers.
• The Haplo Research Manager suite manages the entire research lifecycle at universities, from project inception, applying for grants, ethical approval, PhD programme administration, and publication of information about researchers and their research on the web. Our products streamline processes and save time - enabling researchers to focus on research rather than administration. They help to protect universities by ensuring good research governance, and enable all institutions to compete more effectively for research funding from commercial partners and during the UK REF research assessment exercise.
• Whilst we've made a great start - building products which make a huge difference to institutions and building relationships with great clients - there is a lot of work still to be done. By joining us now, you'll play a critical role in influencing the design of our products whilst benefitting from the work we've already completed. At Haplo, we believe the best results come from team members who have the responsibility and freedom to direct their own work and readily influence how the team works.
• In this role, you get to think about the nuts and bolts of how web applications are developed. You’ll be building APIs, creating reusable components, and working with your colleagues to make iterative improvements.
• Our open source web application framework for developing information rich applications extends from a low level search engine up to high level UI components, along with everything in the middle. One day you could be using the latest front end technology, the next delving into the guts of a non-relational object store.
• Our work is a bit different. We went to the effort of developing our own platform because nothing else could do what we needed. Before it was fashionable, we moved away from the relational model and built server side JavaScript APIs. Our platform is mature and incredibly effective at building applications to manage semi-structured information — and easy to extend and evolve to handle new requirements.
• You’ll be a leading voice in shaping our development practises. We build highly customised applications with lots of business logic on top of integrated products, and our API design and development processes must enable this to be maintainable and sustainable in the long term.
• We care about quality and doing things right. We know that doing things well means we can move faster, and so have minimal technical debt and legacy code. You’ll be making improvements and driving us forward, supported by a leadership team who will reduce scope, not quality.
• It’s an exciting time to join. We’re market leaders in our niche, and expanding out into related products. You’ll have the excitement of building new things, within the stability of a company with a proven business and enviable reputation.