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Editorial Web Developer, The Times & Sunday Times
The Role
The successful candidate will be part of a small team of editors and developers that will conceive, code, test, deploy and iterate on innovative products. Your work will involve collaborating with reporters, multimedia editors, data journalists, the social media team, commercial and marketing.
The role requires a range of programming languages: HTML5 & CSS3; Java/Java developer experience; as well as the ability to scrape and wrangle complicated data and pull data from APIs. Server-side / scripting languages such as Ruby, Python or R-language would be advantageous.
The ideal candidate will be passionate about reader experience and storytelling; and ambitious to develop ways of enhancing Times and Sunday Times journalism in a way that engages subscribers and potential customers and provides a premium experience. This is an opportunity for you to contribute significantly to the shape, direction, and execution of the goals of the News Development team, identifying opportunities to drive value from our journalism and challenge projects that do not deliver great value.
The focus will be on long-term projects as well as high-impact news stories with a shorter turnaround.
You will build strong relationships and mutual trust across the Times and Sunday Times newsroom and the wider technology functions. You will work with and alongside the News International Technology department, earning credibility and mutual trust.
Knowledge of how to build and maintain a useful datastore is desirable; as is familiarity with tools to clean and interrogate data – such as Excel, Google Refine, Google fusion tables and mapping software.
Desired Skills & Experience
Experience as a web developer or mobile developer building digital products
Comfortable using whatever open source tools we need to create innovative products quickly, with limited budgets and to the rhythms of daily and weekly newsrooms.
Imaginative, creative and innovative; coming up with new ways to create, share, and present our journalism in order to reach the widest audience possible and further our strategic goals.
Loves change, challenges old working practices, and is always looking for opportunities to do things better.
Works hard and has the ability to work across two unique and dynamic newspapers, at the same time as working across a complex business, to make things happen.
Whilst newsroom experience is not necessary, the successful candidate must have an appreciation and interest in journalism and the day-to-day realities of creating the news. An ability to a work hard and fast to meet deadlines is essential.
A good understanding of the range and breadth of data sources in the UK and internationally is helpful, but not essential
Essential Skills:
Developing front end apps across platforms: HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript
Server-side / scripting languages, e.g. Ruby, Python, R-language
Advantageous Skills
GIS mapping & reverse geocoding using postcode databases, Google Maps, fusion tables, etc
Relational databases e.g. MySQL, PostgreSQL, Access
NoSQL document stores e.g. Mongo, Redis, CouchDB