We’re looking for an experienced freelance django developer who’s comfortable working at mid-level or above to join our small, but ambitious team on a part-time contract basis.
This role will support feature development and maintenance for our django-based Green Web Foundation platform. The platform is made up of a number of interconnecting parts which form an integral part of our work towards a fossil-free internet. It houses our Green Web Provider Portal (source code in GitHub) and Green Web Dataset which support the collation of sustainability information from various digital hosting providers. It also powers the majority of our Green Web Foundation APIs and our Green Hosting directory.
We are a remote friendly organisation, and are happy for you to work from anywhere to a weekly routine of your choice, as long as you can join us for between 2 and 3 calls a week based in the CET timezone. We have office space you are welcome to use in Berlin, Germany.
We’re looking for this role to start as soon as possible, to cover three days a week and to last until April 2026. Between €350 and €500 a day would work well with the budget we have available. The days per week and budget are open to negotiation.
The closing date for applications is Monday 10th March, but we may close sooner if a suitable applicant comes along before then. Our advice: if this role feels like a good fit for you, don’t wait to apply!
Key responsibilities of the role
- Support or lead as appropriate on the technical design and build of new features for the django platform in collaboration with other team members, who are also likely to work remotely.
- Produce and maintain both internal and external facing documentation for how the platform works, how to use the Green Web APIs and Datasets, and demonstrate common use cases.
- Monitor system performance, and advocate for maintenance work needed to keep the system in a performant, and reliable condition.
- Occasionally review outside open source contributors for the platform, and provide thoughtful, and sensitive feedback.
Candidate must haves
- Strong written and verbal English is essential.
- Commercial experience working with Django, Django Rest Framework, and Pytest for testing.
- Worked on customising the django admin, including working with custom model formsets and adapting admin html templates.
- Implemented features working directly the the following technologies: AWS S3-style object storage, relational databases like MySQL and PostgreSQL.
- Comfortable negotiating the scope of features with technical members of the team and collaboratively working on acceptance criteria together.
- Experience writing developer focused documentation, especially for code you have written.
- Experience with and enjoy “working open” – on open source or open culture projects.
- Interest in seeing sustainability concepts applied to the digital domain.
- Able to work with group primarily based in the CET timezone, and able to join synchronous calls for planning, retrospectives, and “show and tell” calls.
- Work on a freelance basis, as an external contractor handling your own invoicing and tax duties.
Candidate nice to haves
You don’t need all of these, and frankly, we’d be surprised if anyone applying did, but they give an idea of what other work you could end up doing as part of this role.
- You have a working understanding of modern javascript aimed at evergreen browsers.
- You can write small/basic front end code (javascript or CSS).
- You are familiar with the Diataxis framework for software project documentation, and along with documentation platforms like writethedocs.
- You are familiar with the C4 model for documenting software architecture.
- You have used at least one the following for collaborating on a feature, or sharing analysis of data – Gitpod.io, some form of Jupyter Notebooks, or the Observable platform.
- You have worked with the following technologies in production. MySQL/MariaDB, Redis, RabbitMQ, Ansible, DuckDB, Nomad, Grafana.
- You are familiar with Sentry for exception notification.
- You have worked with at least half of the packages listed in the our django codebases’s list of dependencies.
A note about diverse teams
We value having diverse teams in the Green Web Foundation. You definitely do not need to be a computer science graduate to work with us, nor based in North America or Europe join our team.
If you are part of a community that is traditionally marginalised in the technology sector, you are especially welcome to apply, because your perspective and experiences would likely help us catch blind spots we might not see otherwise as a team.
What the hiring process looks like
We’re only accepting applications directly from individuals. Our policy is that we won’t be progressing any applications that come to us via recruitment agents, agencies or outsourcing specialists.
- You send us your application by Monday 10th March. Please use the form below. We may close sooner if a suitable applicant comes along before then. Our advice: if this role feels like a good fit for you, don’t wait to apply!
- We screen applications on Monday each week. We don’t want people hanging around waiting for answers, so you’ll hear back from us on a Tuesday if you submitted your application by midday CET on a Monday. Our Director of Operations, Hannah, will screen initial applications. She’ll let you know if we choose to proceed your application to the next stage or not. We can’t promise detailed feedback about your specific application at this point.
- Interview call. We arrange a 45 minute video call to get to know each other, with you and two people from our leadership team (Chris, Michelle or Hannah). This provides a chance to talk about your previous work and experience, discuss what a mutally benefical working arrangement would be and clarify any questions you might have.
- We make a decision. We plan to make a decision no later than Friday 14th March about proceeding. We’ll give you a call to let you know our decision as close to your interview as possible. If our decision is not to proceed with hiring you, we will provide some useful and specific feedback to help you with future applications.
- Start work and onboarding. In your first week, you’ll meet the other people working in the project via video call, this is likely to be 2 or 3 other people. We’ll share our company handbook with you and invite you to the corresponding project management and collaboration systems.
How to register interest
Please use the form below to register interest and provide the requested information.