Principal Software Engineer
- Employer
- The Washington Post
- Location
- Washington, DC
- Posted
- Aug 01, 2022
- Closes
- Aug 11, 2022
- Ref
- JR-90273816
- Function
- IT, School and Teaching, Principal
- Industry
- Engineering
- Career Level
- Experienced (Non-Manager)
- Hours
- Full Time
Job Description
The Washington Post is looking for a collaborative engineer who would like to work closely with our newsroom, product team, data scientists, and other engineering teams to build the next generation of elections data infrastructure at The Post.
This role is on the Elections Engineering team. We're a Python and Node shop, working on getting live-updating election results across the Post's platforms and other projects such as wrangling campaign finance data or creating an election night voter turnout model. In particular, this role would be focused on building robust and maintainable infrastructure to deliver timely election data to Post readers.
Even when working on shorter-term projects, this team strives to make our software reusable so we can build on the work and respond to similar requests faster in the future. Our ideal candidates are creative problem-solvers who are comfortable evaluating our processes and recommending changes. This position is remote-friendly for work in the U.S.
Responsibilities
The Post strives to provide its readers with high-quality, trustworthy news and information while constantly innovating. That mission is best served by a diverse, multi-generational workforce with varied life experiences and perspectives. All cultures and backgrounds are welcomed.
The innovation doesn't end in the Newsroom - dozens of teams power The Washington Post. We are now hiring the next innovator - how will you Impact Tomorrow?
#washpostlife
The Washington Post is looking for a collaborative engineer who would like to work closely with our newsroom, product team, data scientists, and other engineering teams to build the next generation of elections data infrastructure at The Post.
This role is on the Elections Engineering team. We're a Python and Node shop, working on getting live-updating election results across the Post's platforms and other projects such as wrangling campaign finance data or creating an election night voter turnout model. In particular, this role would be focused on building robust and maintainable infrastructure to deliver timely election data to Post readers.
Even when working on shorter-term projects, this team strives to make our software reusable so we can build on the work and respond to similar requests faster in the future. Our ideal candidates are creative problem-solvers who are comfortable evaluating our processes and recommending changes. This position is remote-friendly for work in the U.S.
Responsibilities
- Enhance The Post's ability to pursue ambitious journalism and digital storytelling by contributing substantially to the team's technical architecture and codebase.
- Keep the team up to date with current technology and best practices by pursuing opportunities to learn and experiment with new tools.
- Improve The Post's ability to deliver election night insights by working closely with our data scientists to make the election modeling infrastructure more robust and maintainable.
- Foster effective team collaboration and communication by improving and documenting internal processes and guidelines.
- Assist in attracting and hiring engineers who want to work at the intersection of journalism and technology by actively participating in recruiting - and contributing feedback on our overall hiring process.
- Advocate for career development of junior engineers and increase their impact on the team by mentoring and guiding them through more complex projects.
- More than five years of experience building and maintaining software applications in a team setting.
- A desire to contribute to the Post's journalism via technology.
- Experience and comfort with microservice architecture, including interacting with services their team does not own.
- Predisposition towards testing, instrumentation, observability and writing documentation.
- Desire to work at a deeper level of abstraction than a single story or beat.
- Experience designing, building and supporting microservices on AWS.
- Proficiency across some of the languages and frameworks in our stack, including Python, AWS services like Lambda and CloudFormation, and Node/React.
The Post strives to provide its readers with high-quality, trustworthy news and information while constantly innovating. That mission is best served by a diverse, multi-generational workforce with varied life experiences and perspectives. All cultures and backgrounds are welcomed.
The innovation doesn't end in the Newsroom - dozens of teams power The Washington Post. We are now hiring the next innovator - how will you Impact Tomorrow?
#washpostlife