Graphics/Multimedia Editor - Data and Tooling, Election Analytics

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

But 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.

Your work will ensure that we can even more regularly tell compelling stories about voting patterns and elections, whether they take the form of articles or evolve into new products that deliver as much insight as our polls and the needle. You will be a key part of producing these stories and products, working with other journalists to understand the data that is available and transforming the data into new formats as needed.

You will also contribute to other areas of our elections coverage based on your skills and interest, including opportunities to pursue original reporting on your own and to collaborate on stories, graphics and tools for readers based on government, polling and other types of data.

Basic Qualifications:

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.

Willingness to work a flexible schedule as needed to support coverage of elections and polls.

Preferred Qualifications:

Journalistic experience or interest in reporting.

Experience working on tight deadlines and making tradeoff decisions to ensure the deadlines are met.

Experience building productionized apps, preferably HTTP-based.

Experience working collaboratively with people of different skills and backgrounds.

This position is represented by the NewsGuild of NY.

The annual base pay salary for this role is between $109,521.19 and $136,000.00.