Graphics/Multimedia Editor - Data and Tooling, Election Analytics

The New York Times•Washington, NY

17h•Hybrid

About The Position

The Election Analytics team at The New York Times produces flagship, standard-setting elections coverage, including the live, election night statistical model known as the Needle and The New York Times/Siena Poll. These efforts rely on a comprehensive election data operation centered around the voter file. This role is responsible for owning this mass of data end-to-end, ensuring reliable, automated pipelines for consistent data formatting and validation of data transformations. Additionally, the role involves developing tooling to enable more data journalists to leverage this data, reducing the existing steep learning curve. The work will contribute to compelling stories about voting patterns and elections, potentially evolving into new products. The position involves working with other journalists to understand available data, transforming it into new formats, and contributing to other areas of elections coverage based on skills and interest, including original reporting and collaboration on stories, graphics, and tools for readers using government, polling, and other data.

Requirements

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

Nice To Haves

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

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