Writer

Contract type : Full-time, flexible hours. We are open to a part-time arrangement for the right candidate, but full-time is strongly preferred.

Compensation : £80,000 to £120,000 per year, based on experience and location.

Location : Our offices are in Oxford, United Kingdom, but many people in our team work remotely. We welcome applications from international candidates, though working hours should partly overlap with core UK working hours to facilitate collaboration with the team. Visa sponsorship may be considered for the right candidate, depending on individual circumstances and relocation preference.

Description : We are looking for an experienced writer. The ideal candidate already writes single‑authored pieces regularly and publicly for a non‑specialist audience, builds arguments based on data and research, and has the range to cover many of the topics we work on. This is a senior role: the person we hire will work closely with Hannah Ritchie, our Deputy Editor.

The hiring process involves a paid writing residency before any full‑time offer.

I’ve been a writer at Our World in Data for more than eight years now. If you’d told me a decade ago that this job existed, I wouldn’t have believed you. I get to spend my days investigating important questions, communicating ideas to an engaged audience, and working with a team of skilled data scientists, engineers, and designers. Every day is challenging, but I feel incredibly lucky to get to spend my time this way and get paid for it.

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But the hardest part of my role as Deputy Editor has been finding and hiring other writers.

What we’re looking for is quite a unique combination. We want someone who writes excellent narrative articles for a general audience, finding memorable framings to make hard ideas easier to understand, while being genuinely obsessed with the technical details: the scientific nuance, the caveats, the honest communication of what the evidence actually shows.

Our work is focused on helping people understand the world’s largest problems and how we make progress against them. The world is awash with data and information, so the right person for us needs to know which questions are important and what readers need to know to understand the answers.

It’s not easy to find writers who do this, so it’s incredibly exciting when we find one who does. In return, I think that Our World in Data can be a perfect home for someone with the passion and drive to do this work. We’re looking for an excellent match on both sides.

What’s difficult about finding the right match is that it’s not just about writing quality or your level of knowledge. It’s also about having a shared sense of the important questions that need to be asked; a commitment to getting things right; a commitment to meeting readers where they are. It's about outlook, values, and taste.

This is hard to gauge from a submitted portfolio and a few essays. That’s why we’ve structured the process in two stages, with a paid trial on the job to give both sides the opportunity to test whether it's a good match.

If you think you fit the criteria below and would like to work with me, I’d love to hear from you. This is an open application with no fixed deadline — we review submissions on a rolling basis.

The full process from application to job offer will follow this structure:

• Your application goes through our initial screening as part of a monthly batch (which will be reviewed at the start of each month).
• Promising applicants will be contacted for a remote interview and preparatory exercise with me.
• Successful candidates will work directly with me as their editor to produce a great article for Our World in Data on an agreed topic. This work will be paid (more details below).
• The previous point repeats for the second article.

The paid work will consist of a writing residency (not a physical residency) during which a successful applicant would work directly with me to produce two articles that we would be happy to publish on Our World in Data. This work would be paid, regardless of whether we choose to publish the articles. If unsuccessful, the candidate would not…