Senior Software Developer, Data and Infrastructure

Investigative Journalism Foundation

1d • Remote

About The Position

The Investigative Journalism Foundation (IJF) is a nonprofit newsroom dedicated to public-interest journalism. We are a new kind of media outlet, built around databases on who donates to politicians across Canada, who lobbies them, and how the government spends your money. The IJF is rapidly growing and is proud to be named one of the world’s most innovative media companies by Fast Company magazine. We were also selected for Fast Forward’s accelerator for tech non-profits, won an Anthem Award for our Open By Default database, two gold medals at the Canadian Online Publishing Awards and the Product of the Year award from LION Publishers. As a nonprofit, nonpartisan media outlet, our primary purpose is to serve the public. We do this by publishing in-depth investigative journalism that speaks truth to power. Our databases are also used by other journalists, policymakers and academics seeking to increase transparency and strengthen Canadian democracy.

This is a one-year, full-time staff position with benefits. Extension will depend on future project funding, which we’re actively pursuing. Most of the IJF’s team is based in Toronto, but we’re happy to hear from candidates based elsewhere in Canada. We’re looking for an experienced senior software developer with real strength in Python and cloud infrastructure to help build out the IJF’s public interest databases. For your first six months you’ll focus on our Local News Finder project, a collaboration with academic researchers that combines AI with structured human review to build the most comprehensive survey of local news in Canada. You’ll own the pipeline that identifies and classifies local news outlets across every community in Ontario and Quebec. The results will shape how researchers and policymakers understand where local journalism exists in this country, and where it has disappeared. From there, you’ll help build the systems that power the rest of our work. Depending on where we are, that could mean working on our upcoming municipal decisions database, which will provide local journalists and the public with searchable summaries of council decisions across Canada’s 130 largest municipalities, at a moment when city hall coverage has largely disappeared. It could also include building out entity matching flows to connect people and companies across our lobbying, donations, procurement and appointments databases so Canadians can better understand how power and influence move in their communities. We are also working on hardening our existing data pipelines so they can run reliably at scale.

Requirements

• Demonstrated experience owning production systems end to end, through design, deployment and maintenance.
• Strong Python experience in production environments, including working with third-party APIs and data pipelines.
• Strong PostgreSQL experience, including schema design and migrations.
• Hands-on experience running and deploying applications on AWS.
• Production experience with React, Next.js and TypeScript.
• Clear written and verbal communication, including with non-technical stakeholders.
• Comfortable working autonomously on a small team and taking your work from design through to production.
• Excitement about working with journalists and building tools to serve the public interest.
• Applicants must be legally entitled to work in Canada.

Nice To Haves

• Experience working with LLM APIs, prompt engineering or model evaluations is an asset.
• Experience with Python web scraping, particularly with tools like Playwright or BeautifulSoup an asset.
• Knowledge of French is an asset.

Responsibilities

• Build, deploy and operate data pipelines on the cloud, designed to resume cleanly when long jobs fail and to keep API costs predictable.
• Design the databases behind the tools you build, with careful attention to keeping track of where each piece of data came from.
• Build internal tools used by our academic partners and reviewers.
• Extend and improve our AI classification pipelines, and build the harnesses that allow us to evaluate changes.
• Contribute to public-facing interfaces for our databases.

Benefits

• Health and dental benefits
• 15 vacation days a year
• Unlimited sick days
• Additional paid time off from December 25 to January 1
• 100% remote work, with the option for hybrid arrangements in Vancouver and Toronto
• A professional development spending account of $1,000 a year
• A home office spending account of $500 a year

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed