The Role

The person in this position will bridge two teams: one a team of award-winning developers who build interactive databases and immersive graphics, the other an outstanding editorial product development team that designs and creates robust tools and publishing systems. You’ll get a chance to learn from, and have an impact on, both.

You’ll work with both teams to extend the functionality of our internal publishing tools, libraries, templates, etc., to support the priorities of individual projects and our overall mission. You’ll also be responsible for improving and maintaining the integration of our core site with our stand-alone sites and applications.

Although journalism experience is not required, you’ll get to work on innovative and meaningful data-journalism projects that are meant to hold the powerful accountable and help people make better decisions and live safer lives.

This position is full-time with benefits. The team is distributed, so remote applicants anywhere in the U.S. are welcome. For those who prefer working from an office, our headquarters are in New York, and we have editorial offices in Washington, Atlanta, Chicago, Phoenix, and Berkeley, California

About You

We’re looking for somebody who has the following:

• A track record of excellence in developing performant, robust software.
• Fluency in modern and widely supported front- and back-end programming languages. Our CMS is written in PHP, our interactive databases are written in Ruby or Python, and our front-end code is built with modern JavaScript and CSS. You don’t need to know all of these, but should know some of them and be willing to learn the rest.
• Comfort in solving the fast-paced problems of a newsroom, while knowing when to slow down to refactor and standardize.
• Familiarity with containerization tools like Docker and cloud hosting platforms like AWS.
• Skill at writing technical documentation others can follow.
• Genuine excitement for journalism and our accountability mission.
• A commitment to being a great colleague and respectful human being.

Getting the Job

The application form will allow you to share some projects you’ve worked on, as well as give you the space to walk us through your own contributions to those projects. We don’t expect your name to be on anything, but tell us everything you did, from behind-the-scenes wins you’re proud of to how you helped your colleagues. If you can’t link to your project, please describe it — especially the development process — as best as you can.

We know there are great candidates who may not fit into what we’ve described above or who have important skills we haven’t thought of. If that’s you, don’t hesitate to apply and tell us about yourself.

We are dedicated to improving our newsroom, in part by better reflecting the people we cover. (Here is a breakdown of our staff.) We are committed to diversity and building an inclusive environment for people of all backgrounds and ages. And we are taking steps to meet that commitment. We especially encourage members of traditionally underrepresented communities to apply, including women, people of color, LGBTQ people and people with disabilities.

If all of this sounds exciting to you, you can apply using this form. We will begin reviewing applications on July 6, but we will continue to consider candidates as long as the posting remains live on our site.

Applicants must be eligible to work in the U.S. Email talent@propublica.org with questions.

No phone calls, please.