Employment Type: Full-Time, Salary, Non-Exempt

Temporary/Permanent: Permanent

Deadline to Apply: This application will remain open until 11:59pm on Tuesday, April 7, 2026.

Rate of Pay: $72,000.00 - $92,000.00, commensurate with experience. This wage band is set and not subject to negotiation.

Job Purpose

The Principal Software Engineer will lead the design, development, and deployment of digital platforms supporting museum collections, research-driven data services, and scientific registries, including ZooBank, the official registry of zoological nomenclature. This position is responsible for architecting a modern, stable, and futureproof digital infrastructure that supports global research workflows, persistent identifiers, open data standards, and high availability public access. The Systems Engineer will design backend services, APIs, database structures, search indexing, authentication layers, and a new public facing interface capable of supporting researchers, curators, taxonomists, publishers, collection managers, and the broader scholarly community. This role is central to transforming legacy systems into robust, scalable, and sustainable digital platforms that meet international standards for scientific data management, long-term preservation, and open science.

Duties and Responsibilities

Platform Architecture & System Design

• Design and build a completely new online framework for a museum or research registry platform, including backend architecture, relational databases, and scalable web services.

• Develop system requirements in consultation with domain experts, curators, researchers, IT leadership, and external partners.

• Architect solutions that ensure high availability, strong performance, and long-term sustainability for globally significant scientific and collections data.

• Implement secure, modular, API driven infrastructure capable of integrating with publishers, journals, collection management systems, aggregators, and external registries.

Database & Data Model Development

• Design a modernized database schema to support collections data such as objects or specimens, scientific names or concepts, authors and agents, publications, events, and persistent identifiers.

• Migrate legacy data into the new platform with careful attention to data integrity, provenance, versioning, citations, and audit trails.

• Implement automated quality checks, validation rules, and monitoring tools to ensure accuracy, consistency, and trustworthiness of records.

APIs & Interoperability Standards

• Develop RESTful APIs to support machine-readable access, system integrations, and automated submission or registration workflows.

• Implement interoperability using community and research data standards (e.g., Darwin Core, Dublin Core, GBIF standards, DOI/PID frameworks, ORCID).

• Ensure the platform fully supports persistent identifiers (ARK, DOI, LSID, or successor PID technologies) for long-term reference and citation.

Frontend & User Experience Support

• Collaborate with UX/UI designers to build an intuitive, modern public facing portal enabling search, browsing, submission, curation, and data export.

• Implement efficient search indexing (e.g., Elasticsearch, Solr) optimized for scholarly queries and high volume access.

• Ensure accessibility, responsive design, and WCAG compliance across user interfaces.

Security, Reliability & Preservation

• Implement secure authentication, role-based access controls, and audit trails for sensitive, curated, or controlled submissions.

• Build redundancy, backup routines, and disaster recovery procedures to ensure uninterrupted public and research access.

• Establish digital preservation strategies supporting long-term sustainability, fixity checking, version tracking, and archival integrity.

DevOps, Deployment & Maintenance

• Manage cloud infrastructure, containerization, and CI/CD pipelines for continuous integration and deployment.

• Monitor system performance, uptime, and error reporting; optimize platform stability and load handling.

• Produce and maintain documentation covering system architecture, workflows, APIs, and maintenance strategies.

Collaboration & Community Engagement

• Work with researchers, curators, publishers, data networks, and open science partners to align platform functionality with community needs.

• Represent technical components of the platform in meetings, workshops, and collaborative projects.

• Train staff and community users on new tools, APIs, and workflows.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor�s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent professional experience).

• Minimum of 5 years of experience building and deploying largescale web platforms or data intensive systems.

• Expertise with relational databases (PostgreSQL preferred) and database modeling.

• Strong experience with backend development (Node.js, Python, Java, or equivalent).

• Experience architecting APIs and integrating with external systems.

• Experience implementing search technologies (Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Solr).

• Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP), containerization (Docker), and CI/CD workflows.

• Experience building secure, high availability, high throughput systems.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with museum, library, or research data systems, biodiversity informatics, or scientific data standards.

• Familiarity with global identifier systems (DOI, ORCID, ARK, LSID).

• Knowledge of collections management, taxonomy, nomenclature, or natural science data structures.

• Familiarity with semantic web technologies, linked data, or ontology management.

• Experience with long-term digital preservation strategies and digital repositories.

Other Requirements

• The position is based on O�ahu and requires regular, on-site presence for leadership and coordination of Museum operations.

• Must be willing to work a flexible schedule, including evenings and weekends, to meet the needs of the organization and respond to operational priorities.

Direct Reports

None

Working Conditions

Occasional evening or weekend work may be required to support system maintenance, releases, and ensure reliable, uninterrupted operation of websites and systems.

Physical Requirements

This position primarily involves sedentary work in an office environment and requires extended periods of sitting, working at a computer, and performing repetitive hand and wrist movements associated with typing and use of standard office equipment. The role requires effective communication, including speaking and hearing, and sufficient visual acuity to perform detailed computer-based work. Occasional standing, walking, and movement between work areas may be required, as well as the ability to lift and carry materials weighing up to 15 pounds.

Disclaimer

The above statements are intended to describe the general nature and level of work being performed by incumbents assigned to this job. This is not intended to be an exhaustive list of all the responsibilities, duties and skills required. The incumbent may be expected to perform other duties as assigned.

Federal law requires employers to provide reasonable accommodation to qualified individuals with disabilities. Please contact us at [email protected] or 808-848-4107 if you require a reasonable accommodation to apply for a job or to perform your job. Examples of reasonable accommodation include making a change to the application process or work procedures, providing documents in an alternate format, using a sign language interpreter, or using specialized equipment.

Equal Opportunity Employer

We are proud to be an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship or immigration status, color, disability, ethnicity, familial status, gender identity and/or expression, genetic information, marital status, national origin, race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, veteran status, or any other protected status.