A best-in-class city that attracts best-in-class talent, Philadelphia is an incredible place to build a career. From our thriving arts scene and rich history to our culture of passion and grit, there are countless reasons to love living and working here. With a workforce of over 30,000 people, and more than 1,000 different job categories, the City of Philadelphia offers boundless opportunities to make an impact.

As an employer, the City of Philadelphia values inclusion, integrity, innovation, empowerment, and hard work above all else. We offer a vibrant work environment, comprehensive health care and benefits, and the experience you need to grow and excel. If you’re interested in working with a passionate team of people who care about the future of Philadelphia, start here.

The Office of Innovation and Technology (OIT) oversees most major technology projects for the City of Philadelphia (CoP), ensures continuity of the City's technology operations, and finds new ways to help the public interact meaningfully with technology. OIT uses technology to help City employees do their work better and helps residents get what they need from municipal government.

What We Offer:

Impact - The work you do here matters to millions.

Growth - Philadelphia is growing, why not grow with it?

Diversity & Inclusion - Find a career in a place where everyone belongs

Benefits - We care about your well being

The City of Philadelphia Department of Records (DOR) provides the public with access to a variety of their public safety reports created by the Police Department and Fire Department, including traffic accident reports, police incident reports, fire reports, emergency medical services reports, and police background checks/letters of good conduct. Up until 2021, this operation was almost entirely manual. In 2021, DOR debuted an online portal through which the public could purchase traffic accident reports and receive them electronically. To automate the process for the remainder of public safety reports, DOR is now seeking to develop a similar portal for police incident reports, fire reports, emergency medical reports, and police background checks/letters of good conduct.

This portal will dramatically increase the speed at which the city books revenue and vastly improve service delivery to the public for reports that are critical documents in criminal and civil legal proceedings, as well as insurance claims. It will also support the more orderly and efficient functioning of the judicial system, and address racial inequities.  The existing manual process for obtaining these reports can take 2-3 months. This delay has a disproportionate impact on communities of color, who often can be navigating the legal system on their own without professional support.

This role sits within OIT’s reimagined Software Engineering group, working on the Department of Records public safety portal project. Created in 2019, OIT Software Engineering is a talented group of engineers reshaping how the City develops, procures, and maintains custom software. Our projects have a huge range and a huge impact - from operating and extending the front door to the City at phila.gov, to building the City’s Campaign Finance tracking system to building world-class GIS applications like atlas.phila.gov. 
We’re developing more standards and frameworks for ourselves and for other developers to use; we use modern tooling (think AWS, GitHub, Docker, Terraform, etc.) and are a highly collaborative, productive team. 
As a Lead Software Engineer on the Public Safety Report Portal, you’ll join the team tasked with building an online report portal to better serve Philadelphia’s residents and businesses. You’ll work alongside UX designers and software engineers to build and design a modern application for residents to use to search for Police and Fire reports in a clean, and efficient manner. You’ll be primarily responsible for building out APIs and database interactions using our core technologies (.NET Core) following well-documented City standards. You’ll get to work alongside stakeholders in a variety of different departments as you help design solutions – both from a technological and a process perspective.
You’ll join a city government that has the largest GitHub organization among cities (github.com/CityOfPhiladelphia), works in the open, and leverages open-source tools and cloud infrastructure to improve the experience of interacting with city government online. 

This role is an 18 month, full time position.

Essential Functions
This job is primarily a backend role, with the opportunity to work across the stack to fill in gaps. You’ll be collaborating with other team members to design and develop the API for this application. You’ll be responsible for reviewing the code of other team members in our Git flow process, writing unit tests, monitoring applications you’ve launched, and supporting applications you and others have written. You’ll also be responsible for working with stakeholders at OIT and other departments as part of our agile software development process. 

Competencies, Knowledge, Skills and Abilities
The following are must haves for us:
•    You have experience writing and designing APIs to be used with modern JavaScript / mobile clients; you have an opinion on API interfaces and know how to implement them.
o    Experience with .NET Core (3.X or greater). If you have worked in Spring Boot, that’s probably fine too.
o    You have deep experience working alongside other developers using source control tools like Git & GitHub.
•    You’re someone that loves to learn; you’re proud of your Google-fu when encountered with obscure error messages
•    You’re able to see projects holistically and identify – and break through – roadblocks; you feel a sense of ownership in the projects you’re working on
•    You’re able to take unclear / incomplete requirements and ask the right questions to develop solutions
•    You believe that unless your code is tested, it doesn’t count

It would be awesome if you: 
•    Have experience deploying – and supporting – containerized applications on AWS
•    Can demonstrate your background writing clear technical documentation for other engineers
•    Have strong opinions on the right way to do things – but an openness to change your mind as you encounter new information – and share these in your code reviews

•    Completion of a bachelor’s degree program at an accredited college or university with major course work in Computer Science, a related engineering field, or equivalent experience – boot camps / alternative pathways are okay; we care more about what you can do than where you learned how to do it.
•    At least 2 years of experience developing modern web applications in a production environment.

Salary Not to Exceed: $90,000 annually

Did you know?

• We are a Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program qualified employer
• 25% tuition discount program for City employees (and sometimes spouses and dependents as well) in partnership with area colleges and universities
• We offer Comprehensive health coverage for employees and their eligible dependents
• Our wellness program offers eligibility into the discounted medical plan
• Employees receive paid vacation, sick leave, and holidays
• Generous retirement savings options are available

*The successful candidate must be a city of Philadelphia resident within six months of hire

Please note that effective September 1, 2021 the City of Philadelphia is requiring all new employees to present proof of vaccination against COVID-19. 

The City of Philadelphia is an Equal Opportunity employer and does not permit discrimination based on race, ethnicity, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, national origin, ancestry, age, disability, marital status, source of income, familial status, genetic information or domestic or sexual violence victim status. If you believe you were discriminated against, call the Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations at 215-686-4670 or send an email to faqpchr @phila.gov. For more information, go to: Human Relations Website: http://www.phila.gov/humanrelations/Pages/default.aspx