Senior Software Engineer

Who we are

The News Literacy Project, founded in 2008, is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization building a national movement to ensure that all students are skilled in news literacy before high school graduation, giving them the knowledge and ability to participate in civic society as well-informed, critical thinkers. NLP is the country’s leading provider of news literacy education and works with educators in all 50 states.

NLP is the leading provider of news literacy education to students primarily through our signature e-learning platform, Checkology®, and to the public through our website, RumorGuard®.

Where you fit in

The News Literacy Project empowers educators to teach middle and high school students how to sort fact from fiction in the digital age. Our signature product is the Checkology virtual classroom, a digital learning platform. Since its launch in 2016, almost 50,000 teachers in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and four U.S. territories have registered to use it. We are seeking a Senior Software Engineer to anchor our in-house and contract development teams. This is a great opportunity for you to put your technical expertise to use to make America more news-literate.

We’re looking for someone who can have an immediate and meaningful impact on our work, through their knowledge and experience building and supporting web applications.

This position will initially report to the Vice President of Product.

About the position

You will join our product team, which includes Technical Lead, Front End Developer, Product Designer, Product Analyst and the VP of Product. Our team is responsible for maintaining and enhancing an e-learning platform and an educator portal. We also are responsible for improving and supporting our website at newslit.org, RumorGuard.org and topical or event-specific websites and email campaigns.

Specifically, in this job, you will:

• Build deep knowledge of our tech stacks and our products and recommend steps toward best practices
• Collaborate with the technical lead to optimize our infrastructure for scalability, performance and costs
• Develop new features or enhance existing features across multiple tech stacks with a focus on analytics, privacy and data security
• Build and support data integrations with school districts using EdTech standards
• Oversee code promotion and deployments, conducting code reviews and providing mentoring to optimize the code base
• Lead work breakdown to streamline development and to iteratively deliver value consistently
• Facilitate quality assurance and user acceptance testing
• Work with the product team to design prototypes to quickly solve problems for educators and students
• Troubleshoot and debug issues and recommend changes in monitoring, documentation or coding practices to reduce bugs
• Support data reporting needs of the organization

You will also:

• Collaborate with fun and dedicated people in all areas of our organization
• Teach our organization best practices in software development through your actions

About you

This position will directly impact many thousands of students in schools across the country and plays a pivotal role in shaping and achieving our organizational strategy. As the Senior Software Engineer, you will partner with the Vice President of Product and the Technical Lead to build and support our e-learning platform and educator portal. You will work with our contracted engineering team to maintain and scale our current applications. And you will work with our product team to prototype and build new products and features for all our web properties. In addition to the qualifications noted above, the successful candidate will have all or most of the following:

• Proven, full-stack, software engineering experience within a cross-functional team environment
• Demonstrated experience managing and contributing to the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) and ability to continuously mature software development practices
• Comfortable leveraging cloud infrastructure to support software engineering process and deploy scalable technology solutions, bonus points for AWS
• Familiarity in software testing concepts like unit testing, integration testing and test-driven design principles to ensure high-quality applications
• Demonstrated experience with components of our tech stack, PHP (Laravel), NodeJS (React, NextJS, NestJS, TypeScript) and Database Management (PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite)
• Familiarity with modern web technologies, frameworks, design patterns and best practices
• Experience mentoring junior developers on best coding and software development practices
• Solid understanding of IAM concepts, including knowledge of SAML, OAuth and OIDC for secure authentication and authorization
• Experience with content management or learning management systems
• Knowledge of edtech standards, K12 data privacy laws and web accessibility standards is desired

This full-time position is virtual. Highly qualified candidates who live anywhere in the United States are encouraged to apply.

The News Literacy Project welcomes applicants from diverse backgrounds. We offer equal opportunity in employment for all qualified persons and prohibit discrimination in employment on the basis of race, color, religion, creed, sex (including sexual orientation and gender identity), national origin, ancestry, age, veteran status, disability unrelated to job requirements, genetic information, military service or other protected status.

We deeply value diversity in the workplace and strongly believe that a diverse team enriches our organization and strengthens our ability to realize our mission (read/print NLP’s Organizational Values [PDF] and Commitment to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion [PDF]).