The Texas Tribune is hiring a software engineer to maintain our software infrastructure and systems, strengthen our security, grow our capabilities and improve our technical processes.
We want to hear from you if:
- You are enthusiastic about our mission and making newsroom workflows better
- You are curious and willing to learn, adapt and teach
- You are detail-oriented and able to set and meet deadlines
- You are interested in collaborating and communicating complex ideas
- You have a strong foundation using Python in a collaborative production environment
You will be part of a team that is constantly improving our newsroom’s systems (including a Django CMS and its interaction with external APIs), as well as prototyping new tools. Your typical day’s work might include revamping a Django app, troubleshooting API connections, reviewing data pipelines with the data visuals team, helping a reporter with a CMS issue, reviewing code or planning for a new feature on the site. This is not a journalism position, but you will work closely with journalists and contribute to building news products. This role can be either in the office or remote. See the location information for details.
Our engineering team works across departments — editorial, membership, audience, events, sponsorships and design — to build tools and websites.
For example, you’d join us working on:
- Extending Django models to build out new content capabilities
- Adding more functionality to our APIs
- Collaborating with our DevOps engineer to help plan and reimagine our infrastructure
- Improving our content management workflow and admin interface
- Leveraging third-party platform integrations to improve team processes
Our stack:
- Django, Postgres, Redis, Flask, Celery in the backend
- AWS and Google Cloud Platform
- Cloudfront and Cloudflare layers of caching
- React and Vue for UI components
- Sentry, New Relic and Grafana for monitoring
- Github, CircleCI and Docker for code collaboration and management
You should have:
- Experience using Python and Django (or Flask) in production
- Experience using AWS, Docker, and Google Cloud Platform
- Familiarity with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
- Understanding of Git and code collaboration best practices
- Familiarity with unit and functional testing
- Ability to improve and monitor server-side performance, database schema, indexing and query optimization
- Ability to speak to the tech side of issues in design/editorial meetings
- Strong communication skills. You ask thoughtful questions and suggest improvements politely and respectfully.
It would be nice if you have experience with:
- Developing content management systems (CMS) and/or customer relationship management (CRM) technologies
- Agile workflows
- API development and integrations
- Container services like Kubernetes and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)
- Serverless technologies (AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Run, GitHub Actions, Cloudflare Workers, etc.)
- Sass, Webpack, NPM and other front-end tools
- Web security threat models and prevention tactics (XSS, CSRF, DDoS, etc.)
- The ability to think in terms of objects, scalability and extensibility, and to explain these concepts to editors
We know there are great candidates who won’t check all of these boxes, and we also know you might bring important skills that we haven’t thought of. If that’s you, don’t hesitate to apply and tell us about yourself.
About The Texas Tribune:
Here’s what you should know about the Tribune. From day one we’ve had disruption, innovation and risk-taking in our DNA. We’re ambitious as all get out but still have the punch-above-your-weight mentality of a scrappy start-up. We believe we can meet the demands of our audience and our own expectations for excellence without breaking the bank — or our staff. We understand not everything is a story for us — we have to make choices — but we’re always looking to expand our boundaries. We’re nonprofit because the challenging economic reality for media these days obligates us to find a different way, reliable and sustainable, to fund serious journalism. We’re nonpartisan because we live in the United States of Confirmation Bias — and we don’t need to be part of the problem. We don’t need to be yet another source of information affirming the voices and perspectives that are already in people’s heads. At the same time, nonpartisan is not non-thinking. We call B.S. when B.S. needs to be called.All of us at the Trib believe the best way to achieve that mission is to resemble the state we cover. We’re committed to building an inclusive newsroom for people of all backgrounds and ages, and we’re taking steps to meet that commitment. We especially encourage members of traditionally underrepresented communities to apply for this role, including women, people of color, LGBTQ people and people with disabilities.
Location
The Texas Tribune office is located in downtown Austin, steps away from the Texas Capitol building. We have colleagues in the organization that come into the office on a regular basis and colleagues that are based in various cities throughout the United States. The person in this role is free to work in our office or anywhere in the Eastern, Central, Mountain, Alaska, or Pacific time zones.Benefits
This job is full time and has the following benefits:
- medical, vision and dental insurance
- a cellphone stipend
- 20 days of paid time off each year
- up to 16 weeks of paid family leave plus four weeks of additional job protection
- 401(k) matching
- support for professional training and attending industry conferences
- remote working flexibility