• Job Type: Officer of Administration
• Regular/Temporary: Regular
• Hours Per Week: 35
• Building: Pulitzer Hall
• Salary Range: $100,000 - $120,000

Position Summary

The Local News Lab is a product team at the Columbia University Journalism School's Brown Institute for Media Innovation, and we are focused on empowering local newsrooms and their communities. With funding from the Knight Foundation, we're embarking on a new phase of products and services development to help local newsrooms better understand and, through data-driven decision-making, better connect with their communities. Specifically, we're elevating the lab from an academic research project to an independent, mission-driven business aiming to transform local journalism. Think of it as a startup inside a university - we're hoping to match the enthusiasm, drive, and initiative that goes into creating a new venture.

We are looking for a software engineer who is passionate about doing thoughtful work to support local newsrooms and their communities. You'll do this by developing and maintaining high-quality technical infrastructure and tools grounded in a deep understanding of the needs of the people working in local newsrooms - from reporters to web developers to publishers - and the people in the communities they serve. Our approach includes a combination of cloud-based infrastructure (including AWS and GA4) and bespoke software tools. We are also building up our own organizational capacity with the goal of becoming a self-sustaining organization. So we're also looking for someone keen to help build out our team and organization.

This is an externally funded position with the continuation dependent on performance and available funding.

Our team is hybrid remote and in-person in New York City. We work out of a beautiful space in historic Pulitzer Hall, at Columbia University, and we believe in the power of in-person connection and collaboration. We're flexible in what this looks like on a given day or week, but over the long term, we believe it's essential for our team cohesion to meet in person frequently.

Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain stable, high-performing data infrastructure and software tools used by both the Local News Lab and our local newsroom partners.
• Drive engineering excellence by contributing to the development of and adherence to reproducible frameworks, unit and systems testing (including A/B testing), and technical documentation.
• Engage directly with our local newsroom partners to understand their needs and their communities' needs, ensuring that we're best serving these needs.
• Participate in product strategy development and refinement, ensuring that technical work meets our strategic goals.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree required plus 5 years of related experience.
• Strong interpersonal skills and the ability to understand technical and non-technical needs of diverse stakeholders.
• Basic foundation of programming knowledge in Python, Java, or other object-oriented programming languages.
• Basic understanding of cloud technologies and web analytics, especially Amazon Web Services and Google Analytics.
• Basic understanding of database architecture and programming.
• Ability to learn new software and technologies quickly.
• Passion for building community and supporting the role of journalism in healthy communities.

Preferred Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in a technical field (such as computer science or data science) OR a bachelor's degree in a non-technical field and four years of technical development experience.
• Experience building tools for and/or conducting analysis of quantitative and/or qualitative data.
• Experience in the journalism field, especially reporting and/or editing.