Interactive Developer

The POLITICO Interactive News Team has one overriding ambition — to push the boundaries of digital storytelling in how our newsroom covers U.S. politics and policy. We make best-in-class election night experiences, scrollytelling explainers, trackers to keep up with an ever-evolving political landscape, and some visually whacky stuff too.

We’re looking for a versatile developer with a passion for great journalism and an eye for design to join the effort, building new story forms that surprise and delight our readers. This person will work with other Interactive News team members and people across the newsroom to sketch, design, iterate and build both one-off stories and long-term projects.

What does this look like? One week, you might focus on creating an immersive, art-driven story in concert with our magazine team. The next week, you could help build a tool that tracks presidential debates.

Long term, we want to build a solid foundation of story forms and templates, making it easier and faster to execute on good ideas and freeing up our creative ambitions for bigger swings. While the majority of the role is project-based, we’d also love to see you pitch and report your own stories when the right idea strikes.

You'll also be joining during an election year, a critical time for our team’s contributions to the newsroom. We’ve already done a lot of preparation for the primary season, but nailing the general will be a big part of our work in 2024.

What You’ll Do:

• Code and Design the look and feel of pages and applications alongside developers, designers, graphics reporters and other visual journalists
• Develop libraries and templates for our team and the wider newsroom to use to help increase the reach and scale of POLITICO’s visual storytelling
• Contribute to the newsroom’s biggest, most impactful projects, including our 2024 election result pages
• Grow your development and design skills by engaging in design and code reviews with the team, both reviewing your work and providing thoughts on theirs
• Constantly evaluate your work, using our style guide, analytics, user experience testing and whatever else can help make us smarter and more thoughtful about design and development
• Pitch original project ideas and refine pitches from our newsroom as a fully vested reporting partner

Why work with us?

We’re a team that cares about helping each other grow and develop. If we get a chance to learn something new, we take it. If one of us wants to try something wacky, we raise our hands to help. And when crunch time hits, we have each other’s backs. You’ll have a chance to work with great people across a range of topics, with permission to draw outside the lines.

What You’ll Need:

• A year or more of experience coding digital stories and news apps, ideally in a journalistic context. You can take a story idea, work with a designer to envision a visual identity, and build out a plan for how to code it.
• Coding experience in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. We’re a React shop and use D3 for our more complex visualizations – candidates with experience in either will get preference. If you have experience working with other front-end frameworks or with Node or AWS services we’d also love to hear about it!
• A great design sense. Your portfolio should show us that you know how to use color, typography and more to craft compelling designs. We design in Figma, but it’s okay if you haven’t used it before.
• A collaborative spirit. We’re a small team, and we win through our partnerships with the rest of the newsroom. You’ll be working with others for most of your projects.

Feel like you don’t quite check all of the boxes? Apply! If your skills tend more towards design or development with other technologies we’d still love to hear how you might just be the perfect fit for this team.

Want to learn more about the position? Reach out to amilligan@politico.com.

We are driven by our values. We are relentless contributors, disruptors of the status quo, collaborators, talent cultivators and DEI stewards. Our culture is defined by grit, total integrity and a prioritization on innovation.

We value our people. We offer a competitive compensation and comprehensive benefits package, including health and wellness benefits, commuter and cell phone reimbursements, retirement plans, as well as work-life balance flexibility and opportunities for career development. Click here for more on what we offer and what it’s like to work for POLITICO.

Let’s keep in touch. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter at @politicocareers and #meetPOLITICO for a deep dive into what makes us POLITICOs and our adventures. We’d love to hear from you! Want to join POLITICO but don’t see a job suited to you? Sign up to be a part of our Talent Network to be alerted of future opportunities.

Equal Opportunity Employer/Protected Veterans/Individuals with Disabilities

The contractor will not discharge or in any other manner discriminate against employees or applicants because they have inquired about, discussed, or disclosed their own pay or the pay of another employee or applicant. However, employees who have access to the compensation information of other employees or applicants as a part of their essential job functions cannot disclose the pay of other employees or applicants to individuals who do not otherwise have access to compensation information, unless the disclosure is (a) in response to a formal complaint or charge, (b) in furtherance of an investigation, proceeding, hearing, or action, including an investigation conducted by the employer, or (c) consistent with the contractor’s legal duty to furnish information. 41 CFR 60-1.35(c)