Lead developer / maintainer

Do you want to contribute to an exciting open source project?

SimpleSAMLphp is an open source lightweight implementation of several identity federation protocols written in PHP. SimpleSAMLphp (or SSP in short) allows users to be conveniently authenticated through Internet standards like SAML2 or OpenID Connect. SSP is a cornerstone in the authentication and authorisation infrastructures of many National Research and Education Networks, but also in healthcare and government. Furthermore, its battle-tested SAML libraries are used in various more comprehensive open source solutions like OpenConext.

The project benefits from a global community of software developers who implement and contribute to the project. SimpleSAMLphp receives financial support from higher education, research and corporate entities. The legal-administrative home of SimpleSAMLphp is The Commons Conservancy foundation based in The Netherlands, where it is established as a programme.

The SimpleSAMLphp board is seeking to fill a part-time role to help sustain and grow the SimpleSAMLphp software and its community.

5-10 hours/week

• SSP can be flexible on the amount of time spent.
• We intentionally list a range of effort: we can live with min. 5 hours per week, we’ll adapt job responsibilities to the available amount of time.
• Hours of available work may increase over time, budget pending.

Goals of the role

• Lead maintenance of SSP code, coordinating the efforts of developers who regularly contribute to the project, ensuring a continuous minimum amount of maintenance and development of the project.
• Ensure good development workflow, standards, policies and security.
• Contribute actively with code.

Tasks Prioritisation of tasks will be done based on the needs expressed by the community and in consultation with the SSP board. The lead maintainer will have a range of responsibilities that may include, but not be limited to:

• Coordinate efforts of the community of developers, including participating in occasional physical hackathons and workshops held in person.
• Coordinate and contribute to software development workflow by fully leveraging Github’s functionalities.
• Enforce good development practices, like:
  • ensure Continuous Integration and automated testing environment is maintaned
  • organise and implement a professional merging policy of pull requests
  • organise reviews of contributed code
  • review contributed code and merge
  • make sure contirbutions are taken care of in a reasonable timeframe
  • monitor and follow up the issue tracker (issues reported by the community)
• Report to the SSP board on a regular basis and work with it to develop the project roadmap.

Requirements

• Strong PHP competence and skills are strictly required.
• Competence and experience with the Symfony framework is strongly preferred.
• Familiarity with identity protocols like SAML and OpenID Connect is desired.
• Familiarity with Open Source software development and Github is desired.
• It is considered an advantage to be able to organise a community of developers.
• Experience with the Higher Education and Research community is also an advantage.

The SSP board understands that strong candidates may not have all the qualifications listed above, and therefore we expect the right candidate will grow into the position over time.

How to apply

If you are interested and feel like you could join us in this position, please send your cover letter and resumé to the SSP board via Jan Meijer (jan.meijer@sikt.no). The board will start evaluating applications from May 10 2022.

Should you have any questions, please contact Jan Meijer at jan.meijer@sikt.no.