This posting will be open until at least Oct. 15, 2024.

We're looking for a full-stack senior product engineer to lead work on our publishing systems and core website. This vital role serves to amplify ProPublica’s mission — publishing web-first journalism with real-world impact — by crafting scalable, efficient and user-centric products.

The right candidate will believe in our mission and thrive in a multifaceted role, contributing both to the long-term product road map and to hands-on development. Your responsibilities will include shipping high-quality and resilient software, and working alongside designers, product managers, data analysts, engineers and agency partners. You’ll write code, contribute to our documentation, mentor your peers and proactively solve problems.

As a pivotal member of our expanding, cross-functional product team, you’ll work closely with colleagues across ProPublica’s newsroom and business operations, ensuring that our product strategies align and advance our organizational objectives. 

Responsibilities

• Act as the primary technical point of contact for our web publishing system.
• Lead the planning and technical execution of tools and product features that support ProPublica’s journalistic, audience and revenue goals.
• Collaborate with designers and engineering leaders to establish technical standards for front-end web development.
• Build tools and product features that showcase our journalism across platforms, including the web and third-party ecosystems such as Apple News and Google News.
• Evaluate new products and features, troubleshoot issues and proactively lead improvements that increase the performance, reliability and security of our products and publishing platforms.
• Collaborate with colleagues and stakeholders across the organization to understand their needs and translate them into actionable project briefs and high-quality code.
• Serve as the subject-matter expert on the website and web platform, providing guidance and mentorship to developers, helping document coding standards and processes and ensuring that we’re following best practices.
• Stay informed about industry trends, tools and platforms that can be leveraged to improve our newsroom’s digital capabilities.

Experience and Skills

• A deep understanding of, and care for, the open web.
• Minimum five years working with modern content-management systems, preferably WordPress, including strong proficiency with PHP and experience building extensions and integrations.
• Experience and comfort with modern, well-structured, standards-based HTML and CSS, as well as website optimization using core web vitals as a guide.
• Experience writing vanilla JavaScript and using front-end development frameworks such as Svelte or React.
• Experience working with AWS-based website infrastructure and tools.  
• Expertise using APIs to query and modify CMS content.
• Familiarity with templating languages such as Twig or Liquid. 
• Familiarity with popular third-party analytics tools, such as Google Analytics, Parse.ly and Google Tag Manager.
• Experience working in highly collaborative, small, efficient teams, with strong problem-solving and troubleshooting skills to support a cross-functional and growing organization.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills.

This job is full time and includes benefits. ProPublica is based in New York, but we’re open to remote candidates. We have offices in New York City; Washington, D.C.; Atlanta; Chicago; Austin, Texas; Phoenix; and Berkeley, California. Applicants must be eligible to work in the U.S.

The expected salary range for this position is $120,000 to $145,000.

This is a good-faith estimate of what we expect to pay for this position. The final salary figure will take into account a person’s experience, accomplishment and location. ProPublica is committed to paying its staff equitably, and these ranges should not be considered career salary limits or caps.

About ProPublica

ProPublica is an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism with moral force. We dig deep into important issues, shining a light on abuses of power and betrayals of public trust — and we stick with those issues as long as it takes to hold power to account.

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