Software Engineer, Shiny

Posit (formerly RStudio) creates software that helps people understand data and make better decisions in real-world applications. Our core offering is an open-source data science toolchain used by millions worldwide, and we aim to make it available to everyone, regardless of their economic means. We’re a Certified B Corporation®, which means we’ve written our open-source mission into our corporate charter. Our commercial products support this work, which helps data scientists manage their work and share the results with others.

About the Open Source group

The Open Source group aims to provide a seamless end-to-end data science experience and to help data scientists learn the software engineering skills they need. We develop and maintain open source packages for data science and scientific communication, including packages like the tidyverse, tidymodels, Quarto and Shiny for R and Python. The goals of the Open Source group are not only to provide a seamless end-to-end experience, but also to help users learn and flourish. This involves developing and disseminating documentation and fostering a welcoming community. We value kindness, humility, openness, and resourcefulness in our work and interactions with the community and each other. 

About the role

The Shiny development team is a small team delivering powerful solutions used by tens of thousands of data scientists daily.  Shiny for R and Python make it easy to build interactive web apps straight from data and share that work with others.  

Shiny is used in almost as many niches and industries as R itself is. It’s used in academia as a teaching tool for statistical concepts, a way to get undergrads excited about learning to write code, a splashy medium for showing off novel statistical methods or models. It’s used by big pharma companies to speed collaboration between scientists and analysts during drug development. It’s used by Silicon Valley tech companies to set up real-time metrics dashboards that incorporate advanced analytics. 

The Shiny family of solutions continues to grow and the team is looking to expand to meet the increasing need.  The team is looking for a software engineer to join the team with a background in R and web technologies to help support and improve the central solution to the Shiny suite, Shiny for R. This means not only contributing to the Shiny R package itself, but also its dependencies (e.g., bslib, htmltools, httpuv, etc) as well as other important packages that integrate with and enhance Shiny (e.g., htmlwidgets, leaflet, plotly, flexdashboard, crosstalk, etc.)

Our developers have high autonomy. They are highly product focussed and are responsible for the full development lifecycle, including triaging GitHub issues, implementing changes, writing documentation, testing code, and interacting with the broader community. Posit is a remote-first organization, and Open Source has engineers in 10 countries spanning 10 time zones.

Things you’ll own

• Authoring, reviewing, testing, and deploying code regularly.
• Helping support the existing product and user base.
• Building important features starting from idea inception through to deployment.
• Creating new R packages and adding features to existing ones to make building Shiny apps easier and more powerful.

Things you’ll help with

• Reviewing pull requests submitted by the community.
• Fixing bugs and adding new features, driven by GitHub issues.
• Developing documentation, guides and content to aid the community on their journey to make effective use of Shiny.

Things you’ll teach the team

• What makes it hard to contribute to the Shiny codebase.
• New ways to help a small team build further on its contribution to open source data engineering software in both the R and Python ecosystems.

Things you’ll learn

• Working on open source in public.
• Fixing bugs and adding new features, driven by GitHub issues.
• Strategies for success as a remote developer.
• Responsibly contributing to a framework with a very large and active user base of data scientists who depend on the software you write every day.
• Effectively navigating, understanding, and modifying a fairly complex codebase that’s been built in response to user needs over many years.

About you

• Have experience doing development work in R as well as knowledge of CSS, HTML and Javascript.
• Experienced user of git and GitHub.
• Are comfortable with *nix command line tools.
• Have a passion for data science and the presentation of dynamic data. 
• Strong debugging skills and an analytical approach to complex problems.
• Should be able to collaborate with all team members and across teams to ensure all the pieces fit together, contributing to and listening to diverse perspectives.
• Extra credit if you have previous experience using Shiny to deliver solutions.

What to expect

Within 1 month, you will… 

• Meet individually with all members of the Shiny team as well as a number of members from other open source teams. (Tidyverse, Quarto, Machine Learning)
• Have built and demonstrated to the team a working Shiny demo app.
• Review and improve the work of your closest collaborators.
• Submit at least 1 PR to the Shiny for R ecosystem.

Within 3 months, you will…

• Have built a basic understanding of the components and architecture of the Shiny for R ecosystem.
• Make progress as the principal developer for a new feature.

Within 6 months, you will…

• Independently triage and resolve a number of incoming Shiny for R issues and requests.
• Be submitting a healthy flow of PRs as well as helping give feedback on others’ work.
• Complete and support the production rollout of a release featuring your work.

Within 12 months, you will…

• Have successfully designed, developed, and delivered a new feature for Shiny for R that has been deployed to production and is in active use.
• Make contributions to the roadmap for future Shiny features and understand how they are intended to improve the user experience.
• Have contributed to new content assisting users in understanding, getting started and successfully building Shiny apps.