Full-Stack Engineer

Description: We are looking for a full-stack engineer to join our team and play an important role contributing to our ability to communicate with data. Our mission is to make data on the world’s big challenges accessible and understandable. This threads through our entire team, from the researchers that shine light on these problems, to the data managers who bring the world’s data into a useable form, right through to your work enriching the technical foundations upon which all this stands.

Contract type: Contractor (full-time, flexible hours)

Location: Remote (US East & EU/African timezones preferred)

Deadline: Hiring on a rolling basis – please apply early, even if you are not available soon

Interview process: We will review applications on a rolling basis and contact candidates for intro calls. Shortlisted candidates will then be contacted for interviews and assessment, involving one or more live coding tests and an in-depth discussion of a past project. We aim to respond to applications within 7 days and conclude all interviews within 30 days, subject to your availability. You will have the opportunity to ask questions and assess us too as you go.

Compensation: We will consider candidates at different experience levels. Compensation will be discussed early in the selection process and will depend on your profile and experience.

• Develop and enhance our ability to visualise data
• Contribute to the structure and functionality of the Our World in Data site
• Work closely with our research team to identify high value improvements that can be made to our tools or our workflow
• Improve our users’ ability to search for the data and explanations they need
• Support and nurture an open source community around our charting tools
• Proactively contribute new ways for us to communicate with data

• 3+ years of development in Javascript, covering both a modern frontend framework (e.g. React) and backend (NodeJS + SQL)
• Strong experience with at least one modern data visualisation framework (JS, Python or R)
• A strong interest in communicating with data
• Prior experience hosting and managing projects on one or more cloud vendors preferred

• 🌎 Mission driven: motivated above all by our mission to unlock the world’s data and help the world tackle its big problems
• ⚖️ Economic: considers which changes will bring the team the most benefit when weighed against the time and effort involved
• 🧐 Independent: self-driven and capable of pushing through projects to completion
• ✍️ Communicator: excellent and proactive written communication, important in our full-remote setting
• 🌱 Gardener: routinely makes the small changes, improvements and bugfixes that keep projects at a high level of quality

• We currently work in 6-week cycles with 2-week cooldowns
  • You will have the focus time to do your best work
  • You will have flexibility around your exact hours, within a full-time loading
• Our stack
  • The Our World In Data site is a Jamstack project using Typescript, React and Netlify, with WordPress & MySQL as CMS
  • Our data pipeline is a custom ETL written using the Python data science stack
  • Our current data catalog lives in MySQL, our prototype one lives on S3
• All our work is open source, even our site

• Improving our on-site search so that people can quickly find the data they are interested in
• Splitting out our Grapher visualisation library so that it can be reused by the community
• Source switching, allowing a person to compare and contrast two different sources for the same metric
• Adding new chart types or visualisation features to Grapher
• Building out our ideas around our future content structure, so that people can more easily understand complex topics

We’re interested in team members from diverse backgrounds, and strive to use fair criteria in hiring. Our team hours are also flexible enough to ensure that those of us with children can manage pick-up, drop-off, sicknesses, and the regular responsibilities that come with everyday life. Come join us!

Email us at jobs@ourworldindata.org with:

• Your CV, resume, or LinkedIn profile.
• A cover letter describing why working at Our World in Data is appealing to you and how you can contribute

Likewise, feel free to send us an email if you have any questions about this role.