Staff Employment Opportunities
We are currently accepting applications for the following administrative staff positions within the Information School. To see full job descriptions and apply please visit the University of Washington's UWHires site and search by either requisition number or keyword iSchool.
Commitment to Diversity
Committed to attracting and retaining a diverse faculty and staff, the University of Washington will honor your experiences, perspectives and unique identity. Together, our community strives to create and maintain working and learning environments that are inclusive, equitable and welcoming.
The University of Washington articulates its commitment in the UW Diversity Blueprint.
Executive Assistant to the Dean
The University of Washington’s Information School (iSchool) is seeking an Executive Assistant to the Dean to play a pivotal role in supporting the Dean's vision and executing key initiatives critical to the iSchool's success. Under the strategic guidance of the Dean of the Information School, this role serves as the backbone of the Dean's office, providing executive assistance and overseeing essential administrative functions to ensure seamless operations and strategic alignment within the School and greater University.
The Executive Assistant to the Dean must be an exceptionally professional individual who works well in a highly confidential environment, has outstanding initiative, and can deliver effective results working independently with general guidance. This position works with iSchool leadership, faculty, staff, students, and committees; contributes to iSchool decision-making processes; and works with UW administration and other UW central offices.
At the iSchool, we create an environment that fosters appreciation, mutual respect, and engagement among and between members of the iSchool, UW community, and beyond, with special attention to the needs of people from historically marginalized communities. We envision a university in which all students, faculty and staff participate fully and meaningfully in campus life without being subjected to discrimination, bias or microaggressions. We condemn any expressions of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, or any other instance of bias and discrimination against marginalized individuals and groups.
In line with the iSchool’s vision for leadership, there is an expectation that the person in this position will contribute meaningfully by bringing new ideas and identifying opportunities for improvement whenever possible and lead by taking actions that exemplify the iSchool’s core values. This leadership may be expressed in diverse ways, reflecting the variety of styles and cultures that are represented by iSchool faculty and staff.
What You’ll Be Doing:
Communication Coordination and Management:
- Serve as a confidential liaison between the Dean and internal/external stakeholders, adeptly navigating global communication schedules and ensuring effective follow-up and outcomes.
- Serve as liaison to the Dean to accommodate communication scheduling and arrangements, including coordinating across global time zones and ensuring follow-up and expected results.
- Proactively anticipate and facilitate the Dean's needs for meetings and events, orchestrating briefing materials and coordinating logistics with precision and foresight.
- Exercise a high degree of independent judgment in communicating with all parties.
- Provide sage counsel to the Dean on current iSchool and campus-wide issues, leveraging deep insights and political acumen to inform decision-making and navigate complexities.
- Communicate as necessary on behalf of the Dean to University administration and external audiences such as the information and library fields, business community, K-20 educational organizations, government and public-sector agencies and international partners.
- Independently draft and disseminate communications on behalf of the Dean, reflecting their voice and style while ensuring clarity and impact.
- Conduct thorough research and analysis to prepare materials for the Dean, empowering informed decision-making and resolution of complex challenges.
- Coordinate general communications for the Dean, utilizing sound judgment; draft and edit documents, co-author various types of written documents for the Dean, such as letters and proposals, speeches, articles, and Information School policies and procedures.
Operational Administration & Event Support:
- Manage the Dean's correspondence and communications, screening and prioritizing incoming messages while maintaining responsiveness and confidentiality.
- Oversee the Dean's calendar and coordinate high-level meetings and events including Dean’s Office-sponsored school-wide events and meetings, demonstrating thorough attention to detail and exceptional organizational skills. This includes setting of agendas, research and preparation of materials, coordinate minutes and note-taking activities, ensure follow-up on action items, arrange any catering, make sure technical needs are properly authorized and coordinated, and provide support for meetings as required.
- Ensure the Dean is fully briefed on agenda items and has received all required supporting materials for all meetings he/she is attending.
- Coordinate travel arrangements for the Dean, planning itineraries and providing comprehensive support to ensure smooth and efficient travel experiences. Manage complex travel schedule, which includes both national and international itineraries. Process travel expense reimbursements and supervise/document their completion.
- Ensure compliance with university regulations while prioritizing the Dean's objectives, demonstrating a commitment to institutional integrity and excellence.
- Prepare the iSchool annual master calendar, in compliance with the Office of Public Records and Open Public Meetings, and in coordination with the other iSchool units as needed.
- Make sure the Office of the Dean is responsive to the public, in collaboration with other iSchool and University units and leaders.
- Coordinate VIP visits, high-level receptions, and other special events, and provide basic hospitality to guests as requested.
- Take ownership and responsibility for Dean’s Office special projects and strategic initiatives as requested by the Dean. This includes project management.
- Work closely with the Assistant and Associate Deans in dealing with special events, projects, personnel matters, and sensitive issues.
Other:
- Attend iSchool and UW meetings as needed.
- Participate in professional development opportunities to expand the knowledge base for the position.
- Perform other duties as required to support the ongoing mission and strategic plans of the School.
Minimum Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in communications, business, or similar field.
- Five years of executive administrative support experience with a senior executive in higher education or another field.
- Six months event planning and coordination.
Additional Requirements
- Highly organized with a professional yet accessible demeanor to represent the Dean independently with tact and discretion.
- Outstanding interpersonal skills and a professional demeanor in person, on the phone, and in written communications.
- Proven ability to handle sensitive situations and highly confidential information with tact, discretion, diplomacy.
- Demonstrated ability to function independently while exercising skill and informed professional judgment.
- Demonstrated proficiency with Microsoft Office applications (Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint) and Adobe applications.
- Demonstrated proficiency with full Google suite of applications.
- Prior experience using Slack, Teams or other equivalent applications.
- Excellent time-management and prioritization skills, with the ability to effectively manage multiple and competing demands, looking at the big picture, and planning far into the future.
- Skilled in working with, and communicating with, persons for whom English is a second language.
- Demonstrated skills in writing, proofreading, and verbal communications. Including the ability to edit documents for clarity that have been drafted by collaborators who are non-native English speakers.
- Demonstrated success in working with persons of diverse backgrounds.
- Ability to interact well with persons at all levels of the University and the community and to interpret and communicate complex policies to others.
- Proven accuracy and attention to detail as well as the ability to work efficiently and meet tight deadlines, and to work with minimal supervision.
- Ability to manage priorities, handle multiple projects, problem solve and exercise good judgment in a dynamic environment.
- Prior experience with project management, with minimal supervision.
- Proven ability to excel in situations when dealing with a great deal of uncertainty.
Equivalent education/experience will substitute for all minimum qualifications except when there are legal requirements, such as a license/certification/registration.
Desired Qualifications
- Knowledge of higher education academic processes and protocols.
- Knowledge of University of Washington policies and procedures.
- One to three years’ experience in supervision of an administrative position.
- Ability to organize and integrate material from diverse sources.
What’s in it for you
- Full benefits, including medical and dental insurance, and retirement plan.
- Paid vacation and sick leave, as well as 11 paid holidays a year and one personal day.
- Fully-subsidized transit pass.
- Work for an exciting, cutting-edge research school within the University of Washington.
- In-person or hybrid work arrangement.
Conditions of Employment
- A satisfactory outcome of reference checks of previous and/or current employment.
- A satisfactory criminal conviction history background check.
Web Application Developer
The University of Washington’s Information School is seeking a Web Application Developer to design, implement, document, maintain, and test custom-built web applications and packaged system solutions in support of iSchool needs. The Web Application Developer also collaborates in the management, operation, design, configuration, deployment, backup, performance monitoring, security, and evolution of web infrastructure and applications including usability, user experience, process enhancements, architecture, idea generation, and other general overarching improvements for the applications or sites created by the Web Development Team.
The Web Application Developer is responsible for making platform and technology recommendations to the Web Development Technical Manager and are a key participant in application and website development in support of organizational goals. Applications built by the Web Development Team are crucial as the school continues to scale in size and reach. They are a key contributor in the ongoing evolution of web infrastructure and core software application development.
The person in this role works directly with other units at the Information School to gather business requirements, analyze business processes, and design solutions to address security, operation performance, integration, and maintainability considerations. They are expected to maintain professional relationships with units that are directly supported by the applications and sites they work on and directly support them. The web applications they work on will serve as line of business tools for units within the iSchool as well as public portals granting access to various iSchool services and data.
At the iSchool, we create an environment that fosters appreciation, mutual respect, and engagement among and between members of the iSchool, UW community, and beyond, with special attention to the needs of people from historically marginalized communities. We envision a university in which all students, faculty and staff participate fully and meaningfully in campus life without being subjected to discrimination, bias or microaggressions. We condemn any expressions of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, or any other instance of bias and discrimination against marginalized individuals and groups.
In line with the iSchool’s vision for leadership, there is an expectation that the person in this position will contribute meaningfully by bringing new ideas and identifying opportunities for improvement whenever possible and lead by taking actions that exemplify the iSchool’s core values. This leadership may be expressed in diverse ways, reflecting the variety of styles and cultures that are represented by iSchool faculty and staff.
What You’ll Be Doing:
Full Stack Web Development:
- Implement requirements by writing code.
- Create and support operation of test scenarios. Develop test scripts. Engage in usability testing as required.
- Support and enhance existing applications and sites in compliance with specifications and security standards.
- Design and develop functional, unit, and other automated and usability tests.
- Review, refactor and rewrite previously-written code to improve and/or adapt code to changes.
- Design, creation, and manipulation of database schema in support of applications and sites.
- Design and create technical and training documentation.
- Develop data flow diagrams, process models, and system documentation.
- Document projects from start to finish.
- Design, build, and maintain custom intergrations between iSchool systems and third-party systems (content management, external websites).
- Use GenAI to assist in designing, building, and refactoring of software.
- Review system logs and messages to identify events and errors proactively.
- Provide follow-up routine technical assistance for problem diagnosis, resolution and ongoing maintenance activities for web applications developed by the Web Application Developer.
- Collaborate in the deployment, operation, security, and maintenance of web application stack infrastructure.
- Research and analyze web infrastructure capacity, utilization, backup, cloud opportunities, and disaster recovery. Plan and implement necessary improvements.
- Research and analyze current Generative AI capabilities to see how they may contribute to development efficiency.
- Incorporate UW Information School policies regarding security, data encryption, and user access management into the web applications and sites.
- Monitor and optimize performance of web server equipment and software.
- Take an active role regarding security in support of web infrastructure.
Project Management:
- In collaboration with the Web Development Technical Manager gather user needs, schedule and attend fact-gathering sessions.
- Assume ownership of projects through the entire project lifecycle, from build to ongoing evolution and maintenance, and future retirement of the application.
- Communicate with stakeholders to identify optimization opportunities as well as changes as processes evolve.
- Assesses change requests in relation to current state of project to determine best strategy to integrate new features and changes.
- Manage complex projects.
- Draft specifications and propose timelines.
- Develop and conduct software application and system operational training for staff: explaining features and functionality; training users on use of applications; developing effective help screens and other training mechanisms.
- Transition users in other units into the systems built by this team. This includes guiding them through the change management process and providing training and resources so they can effectively leverage their new software.
Other duties:
- Represent the Information School on campus-wide committees related to web and custom applications development.
- Attend School meetings and University meetings relating to web and server infrastructure technologies.
- Attend regularly scheduled IT meetings and all iSchool staff meetings.
- Participate in professional development opportunities to expand knowledge base for the position.
- Other duties as assigned.
Our tech stack:
- Microsoft Azure and Docker Hub
- Github, Github Projects and Github Workflows
- MySQL
- Laravel with custom modules
- Custom Vue.js code
- Github Copilot
- Azure OpenAI Service
Minimum Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience in informatics, computer science, management information systems or related technical field.
- At least two years of web application development experience with PHP, JavaScript or another OO language.
Additional Requirements
- Professional experience using web frameworks.
- Experience with current versions of PHP, JavaScript, and MySQL Deep understanding of HTML, CSS, and web standards.
- Experience with command line Linux and revision-control software, such as Git or Mercurial.
- Strong knowledge of web stacks, including installation, support & troubleshooting, security, deployment, and performance monitoring.
- Familiarity with RESTful Web Services, JS frameworks, cross-platform/browser compatibility issues.
- Familiarity with usability practices, user interface design, accessibility (508).
- Ability to deliver projects on time and within specifications.
- Detail oriented, possess strong organizational skills and have a good sense of algorithms and code principles such as SOLID, DRY, and encapsulation.
- Strong verbal and written communication skills with exceptional interpersonal communication skills.
- Demonstrated ability to work both independently, and as part of a collaborative team.
- Demonstrated success working with diverse populations.
Equivalent education/experience will substitute for all minimum qualifications except when there are legal requirements, such as a license/certification/registration.
Desired Qualifications
- Experience developing on Laravel or another MVC framework, such as Symfony, Django, or Rails.
- Experience with VueJS, NPM, NodeJS, and webpack.
- Experience using and extending a Content Management System (CMS), Drupal experience a plus.
- Experience creating database schemas to support the storage of complex data.
- Strong understanding of usability and accessibility principles.
- Experience with Docker, Docker compose, and working on a Docker Swarm or Kubernetes cluster.
- Broad experience deploying and managing various types of servers.
What’s in it for you
- Full benefits, including medical and dental insurance, and retirement plan.
- Paid vacation and sick leave, as well as 10 paid holidays a year and one personal day.
- Fully-subsidized transit pass.
- Work for an exciting, cutting-edge research school within the University of Washington.
- In-person, hybrid, or fully-remote work arrangement.
Conditions of employment
- A satisfactory outcome of reference checks of previous and/or current employment.
- A satisfactory criminal conviction history background check.
Questions regarding openings at the Information School should be directed to ihrhelp@uw.edu. We will do our best to respond to your inquiry within 2 business days.
The University of Washington is an affirmative action and equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, protected veteran or disabled status, or genetic information.