News Apps Developer, Elections

Job Description

News Apps Developer, Elections (Temporary)

Across our organization, we're building a workplace where collaboration is essential, diverse voices are heard, and inclusion is the key to our success. We are committed to doing the right thing in our journalism and in every role at NPR. This means that integrity, adherence to our ethical standards, and compliance with legal obligations are fundamental responsibilities for every employee at NPR.

Help NPR cover the 2022 midterm elections as a news apps developer. In this 6-month temporary role, you would work primarily on election results for the November 2022 general election. Duties include: updating and extending our work from 2020 (GitHub repo); setting up and testing our data pipeline (including election results from the AP elections API); modifying or creating new results displays; setting up embed offerings for our Member Station partners; and otherwise serving as technical lead for midterm election results. You'll work closely with members of the News Apps team, in collaboration with the Washington Desk and other departments at NPR. You may be assigned other projects as bandwidth permits.

RESPONSIBILITIES
• Translate editorial goals into sustainable applications and infrastructure.
• Work closely with individual story producers, editors and teammates to identify opportunities for visual storytelling, data visualization and/or analysis
• Assess what work realistically can be executed in the time available and meet agreed-upon deadlines
• Document your work for teammates, newsroom colleagues and/or external audiences, as relevant
• Coach other team members, articulating story, design and code suggestions in a helpful and supportive way
• Maintain and extend the team's technical infrastructure and development best practices
• Other duties as assigned

QUALIFICATIONS

EDUCATION: Bachelor's degree or equivalent work experience

Three or more years of experience in news development (or a similar field)

WORK LOCATION: This is a remote-permitted role. This role is based out of our Washington, DC, office but the employee may choose to work on a remote basis from a location that NPR approves.

REQUIRED SKILLS
• Experience with Node, EJS and other elements of our technology stack.
• Experience designing interactive or data-heavy projects with a static architecture.
• Experience with setting up servers, crons and server-side data processing workflows.
• Familiarity with Amazon Web Services and provisioning AWS resources using the console, CLI and API.
• Solid news judgment. You can think of software in terms of the information needs of the audience.
• Fluency in JavaScript, HTML5 and CSS3, including responsive web design techniques.
• Proven success implementing complex designs in HTML/CSS.
• Experience developing software projects using the Git version control system.
• Cultivate and promote diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace
• Cultivate and support an inclusive and equitable workplace culture

PREFERRED SKILLS
• Experience with the AP elections API
• Experience working iteratively and collaboratively (for example, using Agile or a similar project management process).
• Experience using web components, including custom elements and shadow DOM, or other JavaScript component frameworks (such as React or Vue).
• Experience with GIS/mapping software such as QGIS, Leaflet, topojson, mapshaper, or ESRI.
• Familiarity with data analysis techniques, especially in command-line or scriptable environments like Jupyter Notebook, Pandas or numpy.

This position is covered under the terms of a collective bargaining agreement with SAG-AFTRA. The minimum annualized salary for this position is $120,000.

Jobcode: Reference SBJ-r70kjk-3-145-16-90-42 in your application.