Software Engineer

We are seeking a collaborative and creative Software Engineer to help enhance our existing systems and support our growing product development needs.

Take a role on a diverse, collaborative, and growing team. Come help build the future of journalism as States Newsroom’s Software Engineer. The role offers an opportunity to help inform communities across the nation, with your code reaching ten million people each month and powering both national reporting and state-focused journalism.

States Newsroom is the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization, with reporting from every capital. Our work provides key insight on policy and politics at no cost to the reader — no pop-ups, paywalls or ads. After completing our expansion in 2024, States Newsroom now employs more than 220 full‑time editors, reporters, and support staff covering 39 states; in the remaining 11 states, we partner with and support already‑established nonprofit newsrooms.

As our organization continues to pursue new avenues to create and distribute our vital reporting, we are seeking a collaborative and creative Software Engineer to help enhance our existing systems and support our growing product development needs.

Fully remote, or based at our headquarters offices in Chapel Hill, NC or Washington, D.C., the Software Engineer is a key member of our small Product & Engineering team. This position reports to the Senior Software Engineer and works closely with product managers to deliver exceptional news products to our network of journalists and our audience of readers.

Day-to-day responsibilities will include offering higher-level technical support to our internal users; development of new products and features for our network of 40+ Word Press-based websites; and working with an array of supporting infrastructure from cloud computing stacks to security, performance monitoring, and caching platforms.

This is a role with room to learn and discover; you’re not doing the same thing all day every day, and don’t need to know everything from Day One. If you are a highly organized and adaptable professional who would enjoy working with and exploring a range of tools and technologies to support state and local journalism’s essential role in our democracy, then this job is for you!

• Maintain and expand functionality of custom Word Press plugins and themes, producing code fixes and updates
• Troubleshoot a range of high-level technical issues for the network
• Support the development and processing of RSS feeds for the distribution of content across the States Newsroom partner network
• Support journalists in day-to-day publishing operation, as needed
• Actively take part in the full timeline of product development: from ideating to scoping to deployment to maintenance

You are someone who believes that journalism is essential to democracy and a more equitable future. You take on new opportunities and tough challenges with energy and enthusiasm. You build partnerships and work collaboratively with others to meet shared objectives. You are able to clearly communicate technical ideas to colleagues with varying levels of proficiency.

Our ideal candidate has 3-5 years of experience in the following:

• Working experience of Word Press:
  • Setup and installation
  • Configuring and updating plugins
  • Troubleshooting issues and finding solutions or workarounds
• Familiarity with PHP/HTML/JS/CSS stack:
  • Familiarity with HTML5+
  • Ability to reason about layout issues
  • Familiarity with CSS3+: precedence order, selector specificity, grid, flexbox, …
  • Familiarity with both legacy and ES6+ Java Script
  • Familiarity with both legacy and PHP8+
• Familiarity with best security practices:
  • OWASP and beyond
• Comfortable with multiple Operating Systems:
  • Windows and macOS preferred
  • Familiarity with Linux/UNIX
  • Experience using command line/TUI
  • Ability to troubleshoot basic OS-level issues
• Ability to communicate technical issues to non-technical audience
• Ability to recognize hard technical issues and elevate them to the rest of the team
• Organized / self-driven fast learner

Other desired proficiencies include:

• Experience with Version Control Systems:
  Git preferred
• Experience with…