The Chicago Tribune Data Visualization team is looking for a senior back-end developer to join our team of news application developers, data reporters and designers. We're a mostly python shop. Our main pursuit? To use data to explain the news, hold public officials accountable, capture the experience of living and working in Chicago.
We create digital stories, applications and motion graphics using a suite of tools developed here and we are looking to build on that legacy. The senior developer would be a key part of that.
Our work helps explain the most important stories in Chicago, whether focused on public safety, politics and the evolving population. We find data that illuminates trends and change and publish to an audience that spans our city and midwest.
The news moves fast and so will this job, as we balance long-term tool development, enterprise storytelling and quick-fire news work. It’s an intense and creative atmosphere to work. A typical day could be working with reporters to make sense of a data set, building out our storytelling toolbox, refactoring highly-used applications or following your own news ideas.
There has never been a more vital time for journalism. With sources of data everywhere and many public institutions under duress, telling clear, fact-based stories is more important than ever.
Our newsroom offers a flexible schedule, competitive salary and benefits and a culture and management team enthusiastic about digital storytelling.
We want our newsroom to look more like the city that we serve. If you’re a person from a group that’s underrepresented in engineering or journalism, we really want to see your application!
##What would you do:
- Design and develop applications, tools and scripts to improve our development to production cycle.
- Help develop crime.chicagotribune.com to be more useful to the public and the newsroom
- Develop and refactor features for Tarbell, our publishing platform
- Assist in reporting and data analysis
- Play a major role in helping other team members gain programming skills
- Background in computer science: a good understanding of algorithms and data structures is a plus
- Knowledge of best practices in writing clean, maintainable code
- The ability to document projects thoroughly and clearly
- At least 3 years of experience building things in Python, including Django and Flask
- Some experience with AWS or an infrastructure management service of similar complexity
- Passion for the news and storytelling
- Love of charts, maps and all things data
##For more information:
Contact Data Visualization Editor Jonathon Berlin, jsberlin@chicagotribune.com, or 312-222-3508, @jonathonberlin