Big Local News is looking to hire a Software Engineer to lead our efforts to envision and create new data offerings and platforms to support local news.

We are a program of Stanford University’s Journalism and Democracy Initiative and collect local data to discover the regional or national patterns that will yield stories with impact. We go after data sets that are hard to obtain because they’re kept in disparate, scattered locations by multiple jurisdictions. Big Local News also works with newsrooms to process, analyze and archive the data they collect. We provide mentoring and training with partner newsrooms. This past year, two of the projects we were involved with were Pulitzer finalists.

The position is a two-year fixed term with possibility of renewal. It is located in the journalism program at Stanford and entails collecting, cleaning and analyzing data in collaboration with newsrooms and also working with students on related projects.

Here’s the official posting via Stanford. It’s listed in the system as a Software Developer 1 position. The role is in-person/hybrid preferred.

Expectations for this role include:

  • Helping to maintain and expand our platforms, along with our broader data gathering and alerting operations
  • A demonstrated ability to create and manage large-scale data and document gathering pipelines
  • Applying software best practices, including team-based version control strategies and automated code deployment
  • Managing cloud infrastructure and managing community contributions to open-source projects
  • Maintaining full-stack web applications, with a focus on Python server-side and React/Svelte on the front-end
  • The ability to collaborate effectively with teammates and external news partners, including one-on-one mentoring.
  • A desire to learn about and apply computational techniques (including but not limited to generative AI solutions) to improve our platforms, data pipelines and alerting systems

Experience with any of the following preferred qualifications is a plus:

  • Fluency in a high-level programming language, including project experience developing in Python
  • Experience with the git distributed version control system
  • Open-source software development or contribution.
  • Distributed computing, container technologies, or cloud development
  • Data Visualization experience, especially using D3 UI/UX and general web design experience
  • JavaScript and modern web-based UI frameworks such as React, Svelte or Vue
  • Experience developing and deploying a software project
  • Demonstrated ability to work both independently and as part of a team
  • Experience with machine learning, artificial intelligence and generative AI

Our biglocalnews.org platform allows journalists – whether freelancers, reporters from one company or collaborators across multiple news organizations – to share data and work together as they report out stories. Our work is designed to be journalist-driven and transformative, to help find solutions for local newsrooms’ ability to produce accountability journalism — the type of journalism that can shift policy and law and create impact.

You can read more about our work here and here.

Apply for the job here, and if you have questions, feel free to reach out to Big Local News Co-Director Serdar Tumgoren at [email protected].