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New York, New York, United States
Hybrid
The mission of The New York Times is to seek the truth and help people understand the world. That means independent journalism is at the heart of all we do as a company. It’s why we have a world-renowned newsroom that sends journalists to report on the ground from nearly 160 countries. It’s why we focus deeply on how our readers will experience our journalism, from print to audio to a world-class digital and app destination. And it’s why our business strategy centers on making journalism so good that it’s worth paying for.
The Election Analytics team produces flagship, standard-setting elections coverage, including the live, election night statistical model known as the Needle and The New York Times/Siena Poll. Both of those efforts rely on one of the most comprehensive election data operations in media, with the voter file at the core.
We’re just scratching the surface of all the journalistic products we could produce with the voter file and the rest of the data we collect — absentee files, precinct-level results, live turnout figures, poll results and more. But our tooling has not always kept pace with our ambitions.
You will be responsible for owning this mass of data end-to-end, for ensuring that we have reliable, automated pipelines for putting the data into consistent formats and for validating that the data is being transformed correctly. You will also be responsible for the tooling to work with the data, ensuring that more data journalists can leverage it without the existing steep learning curve. (We are an R shop, though prior R experience is not a necessity.) If you like solving problems for which there is little, if any, documented precedent, this would be a fun job for you.
Your work will ensure that we can even more regularly tell compelling stories about voting patterns and elections, whether they take the form of articles or evolve into new products that deliver as much insight as our polls and the Needle. You will be a key part of producing these stories and products, working with other journalists to understand the data that is available and transforming the data into new formats as needed.
You will also contribute to other areas of our elections coverage based on your skills and interest, including opportunities to pursue original reporting on your own and to collaborate on stories, graphics and tools for readers based on government, polling and other types of data.
This is an in-office position based in New York City or Washington, D.C., and includes regular attendance in the office four days each week. There may be some flexibility to work remotely per your departmental guidance.
To apply, you MUST include a cover letter of no more than 300 word that...
- described the solution you developed to a unique technical problem, preferably one around data; and
- directly addresses your interest in and experience with the type of data you expect to be working with in this role
Responsibilities:
Develop libraries in R that form the basis of our apps
Work with colleagues to onboard them to existing tools and develop new tooling as needed
Maintain the pipelines that process and score the voter file, a list of registered voters that forms the basis of much of our work
Develop tooling to support, deploy and monitor R apps in Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services
Balance engineering principles with the need to move at the speed of news
Demonstrate support and understanding of our value of journalistic independence and a strong commitment to our mission to seek the truth and help people understand the world
This role reports to the Director of Election Analytics
Basic qualifications:
5+ years of relevant work experience
Familiarity working with large data sets and with best practices in data management
Experience working with data-oriented programming languages, such as R or Python, specifically creating packages or libraries, debugging third-party software and otherwise using scripting languages to power complex apps
Experience working with cloud computing providers such as Google Cloud Platform or Amazon Web Services
Experience solving complex problems that require developing original solutions
Experience working on tight deadlines and making tradeoff decisions to ensure the deadlines are met
Experience working collaboratively with people of different skills and backgrounds
Willingness to work a flexible schedule as needed to support coverage of elections and polls
Preferred qualifications:
Journalistic experience or interest in reporting, particularly on elections
Experience developing ETL pipelines, working with orchestration tooling, and ensuring reliability and observability
Experience with Google BigQuery or other OLAP databases; knowledge of patterns for data warehousing and analytical stores; or knowledge of formats and tools for working locally with large data sets
Experience developing high-speed modeling applications
Experience building productionized apps, preferably HTTP-based
This position is represented by the NewsGuild of NY.
REQ-019971
Additional Compensation and Benefits
For roles in the U.S., dependent on your role, you may be eligible for variable pay, such as an annual bonus and restricted stock. Benefits may include medical, dental and vision benefits, Flexible Spending Accounts (F.S.A.s), a company-matching 401(k) plan, employee stock purchase plan, paid vacation, paid sick days, paid parental leave, tuition reimbursement and professional development programs.
For roles outside of the U.S., information on benefits will be provided during the interview process.
Candidate Use of GenAI Tools:
We’re excited to learn more about you and your experience. To keep our hiring process as fair and authentic as possible, we ask that you submit your own work and not use GenAI tools to generate substantive content during the application and interview process.
If you’re an engineering candidate, we’ll let you know what specific GenAI tools you are permitted to use for your technical assessment.
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