Product Engineer, Membership and Front-End

ProPublica is an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest. 

ProPublica is hiring a software engineer to work primarily on the systems and services that power our audience data platforms. This important role serves to advance ProPublica’s mission — publishing journalism with real-world impact — by enabling systems that bring us greater understanding of our audiences and donors.

We’re looking for an experienced engineer who believes in our mission and thrives in multifaceted roles, contributing both to the long-term product road map and to hands-on development. Your responsibilities will include shipping high-quality and resilient code and collaborating with designers, product managers, data analysts, other engineers and agency partners. You’ll write code, configure no- and low-code integrations, contribute to our documentation, share your expertise and proactively solve problems.

As a member of our expanding, crossfunctional product team, you’ll work with colleagues across ProPublica’s engineering, audience and membership operations, ensuring that our capabilities align with our principles and advance our organizational objectives. This position reports to our director of product engineering and will work closely with the audience data and insights analyst.

What you’ll do

• Build and ship reader-facing features that drive membership — calls to action, donation flows, and account and authentication experiences — with clean, resilient code.
• Integrate the systems behind them: messaging tools, payments and donation processing platforms, user accounts, CDP and CRM, and the data infrastructure that connect them.
• Instrument the audience and donor journey. Set up accurate and actionable event tracking so every meaningful step is captured cleanly and becomes data we can act on.
• Support making experimentation routine. Build the infrastructure for A/B testing and, with internal business teams, run experiments regularly so our decisions rest on evidence instead of guesswork.
• Write front-end  services and integrations as needed. (Our site runs on Wordpress VIP.)
• Working with our engineering leaders, protect reader privacy and keep us compliant with legal and regulatory requirements.

Required qualifications

• At least three years of experience in front-end software development and system integrations, with a track record of implementing and maintaining performant, secure, scalable solutions.
• Experience interacting with audience and reader data platforms, such as Salesforce, Google Analytics, Parse.ly, Sailthru, or similar CRMs, CDPs and analytics tools.
• Experience working on a customer data platform implementation within the last two years.
• Excellent problem-solving and troubleshooting skills, with experience in a highly collaborative team environment, supporting diverse stakeholders and adapting solutions to evolving business needs.
• Clear and effective spoken and written communication skills, with the ability to document technical processes and present complex integration workflows to both technical and nontechnical stakeholders.
• Ability to travel for occasional staff summits or other required events.

Preferred qualifications

• Prior experience implementing solutions such as Piano or MonetizationOS or building similar functionality.
• Working knowledge of Wordpress and/or Wordpress VIP.
• Fluency with at least one language used in web development, such as PHP, Typescript or vanilla JS.
• Track record of doing hands-on work with cloud data warehouses like Google BigQuery and customer data platforms such as Braze or Hightouch.
• Knowledge of newsroom workflows and a passion for journalism.

This job is full time and includes benefits. ProPublica is based in New York, but we’re open to remote candidates. We have offices in New York City; Washington, D.C.; Atlanta; Chicago; Phoenix; and Berkeley, California. Applicants must be eligible to work in the U.S.

This role is subject to an in-office work requirement of two days per week in the New York City office. That requirement may be extended to other offices with 60 days’ notice. 

This job is covered under the terms of a collective bargaining agreement with The NewsGuild of New York, Local 31003, CWA, AFL-CIO

The expected salary range for this position is $120,000 to $145,000.

This is a good-faith estimate of what we expect to pay for this position. The final salary figure will take into account a person’s experience, accomplishment and location. ProPublica is committed to paying its staff equitably, and these ranges should not be considered career salary limits or caps.

We will begin reviewing applications as we receive them, but we will continue to consider candidates as long as the posting remains live on our site.

Questions? Send an email to talent@propublica.org. 

No phone calls, please.

We know there are great candidates who may not fit into what we’ve described above or who have important skills we haven’t thought of. If that’s you, don’t hesitate to apply and tell us about yourself.

We are dedicated to improving our newsroom, in part by better reflecting the people we cover. (Here is a breakdown of our staff.) We are committed to diversity and building an inclusive environment for people of all backgrounds and ages. And we are taking steps to meet that commitment. We especially encourage members of traditionally underrepresented communities to apply, including women, people of color, LGBTQ+ people and people with disabilities. We are an equal opportunity employer and prohibit discrimination and harassment of any kind. All employment decisions are made without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, national origin, age or any other status protected under applicable law.