Overview

Creative Commons is building a “front door” to the commons from the ground up. We need a talented team of engineers to design and build systems to index over 1.2 billion works into a catalog that will fuel a usable and vibrant commons, enable new research and services, and foster discovery and collaboration.

This project will unite billions of records for openly-licensed and public domain works and metadata, across multiple platforms, diverse media types, and a variety of user communities and partners. It’s a difficult but rewarding problem for an inspired and creative team. We want to build this product with a small dev team as part of an open community, and create something useful, delightful, and essential to the work of creators, educators, scientists, cultural institutions, and our partners. We’re building shared infrastructure for the global commons.

You can read about our previous efforts here, here and here.

As our front end engineer you can be part of this exciting project in an early stage. You will help design, build, test, and release our software infrastructure, and collaborate with users, contributors, and partners around the world. Imagine all the possibilities!

Primary Responsibilities

This is a rare opportunity to collaborate in an organization that is fundamental to sharing online, working at a global scale. The successful candidate will play a crucial role in this high-priority project.

We believe that diverse teams build better organizations and better services. Applications from qualified candidates from all backgrounds, including those from under-represented communities, are VERY welcome.

The front end engineer reports to the Director of Product Engineering and will ideate, design and implement great experiences and interfaces for our global users and partners.

The front end engineer is responsible for:

  • Providing an usable, human-centered, accessible perspective to our code and products
  • Designing, testing and building user interfaces and experiences that will make the commons more accessible and usable.
  • Working in the open, contributing code and engaging in public repositories, open chat rooms, and public wiki with our global community
  • Provide technical opinions within various open communities, working with CC partners.
  • Collaborate with other outside communities, companies, and institutions to further Creative Commons’ mission.

Qualifications and requirements

  • Ample experience designing, writing, testing and deploying modular JavaScript code agnostic of frameworks and browsers. You can show us your code, and describe how you wrote and iterated on it.
  • Keen eye for designing usable and accessible and delightful human-facing interfaces and user experiences. You’ve done user testing, and have experience designing and coding user interfaces for consumer-grade tools.
  • Able to seamlessly design or modify graphic elements and implement them in code
  • Experience in other languages besides JavaScript. Python (Django) preferred.
  • Familiarity with content and data licensing a plus, but not required
  • Desire to work in a diverse, global, open, and highly collaborative team environment

Work Environment and Location

Creative Commons is a distributed organization. This position is available to applicants working in the range of the Eastern to Pacific time zones, in a remote working environment. You must have reasonable mobility for necessary travel, and high-speed broadband access. Laptop/desktop computer and necessary resources are supplied. Some travel is required for, among other things, face-to-face meetings and the annual CC Summit.

Salary and Benefits

Creative Commons is a leading non-profit employer, offering competitive salaries and benefits, including health and wellness plans, annual retirement contributions, and a positive, supportive work environment. The salary range for this position is $80K – 100K USD (or equivalent).

About CC

Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that enables the sharing and use of creativity and knowledge through free legal tools. We are a leader in the global movement for free culture and open knowledge with an active global community in over 85 countries. Our free, easy-to-use copyright licenses provide a simple, standardized way to give the public permission to share and use your creative work — from “all rights reserved” to “some rights reserved.” The first phase of CC’s work was about establishing the licenses as standard, and growing the archive. The next phase is building a global movement that will create a more vibrant, usable commons powered by collaboration and gratitude. Today, the global commons stands at over 1.2 billion licensed works, made up of photos, video, audio, datasets, open textbooks, research, 3D models, and more.