Graphics/Multimedia Editor - Data and Tooling, Election Analytics

The New York Times•Washington, DC

6h•Hybrid

About The Position

The Election Analytics team at The New York Times produces 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, with the voter file at its core. The team aims to expand journalistic products using various data sources like absentee files, precinct-level results, live turnout figures, and poll results, but their current tooling needs improvement to match these ambitions. This role is responsible for end-to-end ownership of this data, ensuring reliable, automated pipelines for consistent data formats and correct transformations. The position also involves developing tooling to enable more data journalists to leverage the data without a steep learning curve, primarily within an R environment. The work will facilitate compelling stories about voting patterns and elections, contributing to articles and new products that offer insights comparable to their polls and the Needle. The editor will collaborate with other journalists to understand and transform data and may pursue original reporting, graphics, and tools based on government, polling, and other data. This is an in-office position based in New York City or Washington, D.C., requiring regular attendance four days each week, with some potential for remote flexibility.

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