The Associated Press seeks a news applications developer who combines advanced technical ability, a collaborative spirit, and a passion for telling important stories that affect people’s lives to join its data journalism team as a newsperson. Location for the position is flexible: you will work from an AP bureau, but all U.S. bureaus are eligible.   

About our team:

We are a team of enterprising data journalists distributed across the U.S. doing data analysis and application development. Together we work on a variety of data-rich news projects: 

• Drilling into large data and document sets for AP enterprise stories and investigations 
• Building newsroom tools that help us uncover the story and create visual journalism at the speed of news 
• Scraping data and executing quick-turn analysis for breaking news stories 

Our news apps developers build software to solve some of journalism’s most challenging technical problems. We’re working to make it easier to collaborate inside the AP and among newsrooms. Here are some examples of the kind of work our team takes on: 

• Developing a collaboration portal for journalists and FOI experts to monitor state legislation that would affect government transparency 
• Creating a toolkit for data analysis that helps our team work together more efficiently and in increasingly powerful ways 
• Devising solutions for collaborative data collection and management that can be used to create data sets where none currently exist 
• Building digital production tools that give non-coders the power to make interactive visual journalism 
• Designing engaging news apps for big stories such as the U.S. elections and hurricane tracking 
• Crafting natural language generation pipelines that turn data into first-look stories, freeing our journalists to dive into the most important stories 

We work with reporters and editors throughout AP and around the globe. Our work contributes to nearly every beat AP covers, including environmental, race and ethnicity, business, health and political reporting. We share the data behind our stories with members and customers who do their own local projects to tell the right story for their audience, multiplying the impact of our work for communities around the country. 

About you:

We’re looking for someone with full-stack experience developing web applications. You’re likely stronger in some parts of the stack than others, but you know your way around a database, an MVC framework and core front-end technologies. 

Most of our apps are built using Ruby on Rails, but we try to use the best tool for the job, whether that means Python for a machine learning task, R for statistical analysis or JavaScript and Node.js to build services. Experience building robust applications is essential, but we’re more interested in how you solve problems than in the syntax you’ve used to solve them. 

You have a commitment to doing something important with your technical skills. You embrace best practices, web standards and agile methodologies. You write modular, reusable code. You refactor and test. But you want to do work that goes beyond the pure good of code. You want to build apps that advance journalism and have real-world impact. You’re a problem-solver. You keep an eye on new technologies and enjoy developing creative solutions, even under tight deadlines. 

You want to be part of a team. You can collaborate and communicate with people of varying technical levels. You take your technical skills seriously but understand that there’s always more to know, and you expect to learn from your teammates in addition to sharing what you know. You’re looking for a team environment that involves consistent communication and pair coding. You enjoy sharing ideas with people from diverse backgrounds, areas of expertise and experience. 

And the one absolute requirement is intellectual curiosity: if you’re a lifetime learner and a willing teacher, if picking up a new technology is your idea of fun, and if you aren’t afraid to throw yourself into research to become the instant in-house expert on a topic, then you’re our kind of candidate. 

A few additional requirements:  

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience 
• Authorization to work in the U.S. 
• Ability and willingness to work any shift, including at night and on weekends, or as coverage demands, as AP is a 24/7 operation. 

   

  Application deadline is December 19, 2018 @11:59pm EST