Graphics​/Multimedia Editor - Data and Tooling, Election Analytics

The mission of The New York Times is to seek the truth and help people understand the world. That means independent journalism is at the heart of all we do as a company. It's why we have a world-renowned newsroom that sends journalists to report on the ground from nearly 160 countries. It's why we focus deeply on how our readers will experience our journalism, from print to audio to a world-class digital and app destination.

And it's why our business strategy centers on making journalism so good that it's worth paying for.

The Election Analytics team produces flagship, standard-setting elections coverage, including the live, election night statistical model known as the Needle and The New York Times/Siena Poll. Both of those efforts rely on one of the most comprehensive election data operations in media, with the voter file at the core.

We're just scratching the surface of all the journalistic products we could produce with the voter file and the rest of the data we collect – absentee files, precinct-level results, live turnout figures, poll results and more. But our tooling has not always kept pace with our ambitions.

You will be responsible for owning this mass of data end-to-end, for ensuring that we have reliable, automated pipelines for putting the data into consistent formats and for validating that the data is being transformed correctly. You will also be responsible for the tooling to work with the data, ensuring that more data journalists can leverage it without the existing steep learning curve.

(We are an R shop, though prior R experience is not a necessity.) If you like solving problems for which there is little, if any, documented precedent, this would be a fun job for you.

This position is represented by the News Guild of NY. It is an in-office role based in New York City or Washington, D.C., requiring regular attendance four days each week. Some flexibility to work remotely may be allowed per departmental guidance.

• 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
• This role reports to the Director of Election Analytics

• 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

• 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 Big Query 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

The annual base pay range for this role is between $ and $170,000 USD. For roles in the U.S., dependent on your role, you may be eligible for variable pay, such as an annual bonus and…