About the National Film and Sound Archive 

The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (NFSA) is Australia’s audiovisual archive, telling the national story by collecting, preserving and sharing audiovisual media, the cultural experience platforms of our time. The collection itself dates back to 1935, making it one of the world’s oldest audiovisual collections. It is also one of the country’s most used cultural collections, with around 125 million views of collection content each year. The NFSA is in a period of significant change. Following increased Government investment, the institution is in a process of digital transformation, establishing the NFSA as Australia’s most dynamic and valued cultural organisation. We are rebuilding our curatorial workforce and developing the NFSA’s capacity to digitise our collection at scale – to preserve it for the future, to make sure it can be discovered, and to share it with all Australians.

We continue to work on developing a stable, secure and future-proof workforce across our four physical sites based in Canberra and Mitchell in the ACT as well as in Sydney and Melbourne.

We are also undergoing a program of business improvement for many of our corporate systems to improve efficiency and reduce manual handling. 

We are an ambitious organisation, and we aim to be an employer of choice within the Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAM) sector, providing exciting and challenging work, as well as favourable employment conditions and unique development opportunities for our staff. 

Cultural Values 

We are an equal opportunity employer, embracing a diverse range of applicants such as veterans, and people who identify as Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander, LGBTQIA community members, individuals with disabilities and/or health conditions, as well as those from varied faith and cultural backgrounds. At the NFSA we prioritise the development of a safe, inclusive, and high-performance culture through shared actions and behaviours that align with our strategy and direction. This empowers our employees to effectively contribute to our goals.

The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia is committed to ensuring a child-safe and child-friendly environment. All employees are expected to demonstrate a commitment to, and support for these principles in theory and practice.

About the Team 

The Product team is part of Digital Platforms Section within the Digital Branch. The team is responsible for developing both public and industry-facing products, including our internal transcription engine, Search and Discovery services, and new machine learning services that will support a far wider range of ways of communicating our Collection.

The Opportunity 

The Prototype Developer is a mid-weight Rails and NextJS coding role, involving strong communication skills and a keen interest in the intersection of product, stakeholders and analytics.
In 2025, the NFSA will launch a new website; a new interface for industry to commercially licence our collection; and a new Collection Data Model that underpins these services. Incrementally, a range of services will be added to track how people and places, things and themes appear across our Collection, built on graph database services currently in development.

The Prototype Developer’s role is to help the Product team identify highly useable, and highly engaging, digital mechanisms to add new users to our services, and to encourage ongoing use. By producing roughly one small, focused prototype a week, and documenting its successes and challenges, the Prototype developer will help the NFSA understand demand for services across our website, industry and public search, and Collection services.

Please note: This recruitment process is intended to fill both current and future vacancies. While the position on offer is non-ongoing (12 months with a possible 6-month extension), a merit pool of suitable applicants may be established to fill similar ongoing and non-ongoing positions within the next 18 months.