The Bureau is recruiting a Software Developer

Java Analyst/Developer (4+ years experience). Salary £40k – £45k
Closing date for applications Jan 1 2015

The award-winning Bureau of Investigative Journalism is looking to recruit a Tech Lead to help the organisation develop and become a more significant force. A key driver of this growth will be the ability to harness digital technology to innovate in the area of data-driven journalism and collaborative journalism.

Our purpose is to enable public understanding of the many important areas of our society that are secret, hidden or purposely obscured by private interests, lobbies, the powerful or the growing ranks of public relations. Our aims are influence and impact: impact in terms of the issues and stories we pursue; influence in inspiring others to seek honest coverage of our investigations.

If you are civic minded and interested in investigative journalism this is a terrific opportunity to help an already successful organisation improve its ability to deliver high quality stories that have real impact.

We are fortunate to be assisted by leaders in the fields of journalism, law and software. The successful candidate will have the opportunity to work with and learn from these highly experienced experts; especially in the field of software technologies and development.

The Role:

You will be the first developer working at the Bureau and you will have the opportunity to lead the growth of the development team if you are successful in helping the Bureau meet its digital journalism goals. You will be involved in all stages of the software development cycle from requirements gathering and specification through development, implementation, QA and support.

The main focus will be on extracting datasets from online sources, sanitising them and then helping the journalists extract news worthy information from the data. It is also expected that data will be retrieved by crawling the web and by indexing the crawled data with software like Apache Nutch, Lucene and Solr.

Once the software tools and methodologies are developed at the Bureau we will be looking at making them available as open source solutions aimed at increasing the use of digital journalism in newsrooms. The successful candidate will be expected to be involved in setting up and running these open source projects and also in evangelising the use of these technologies.

The Bureau prefers that all development is done using the Java and Scala languages and that open source is used wherever possible. The chosen candidate will be trained in Scala as the Bureau expects that software developed in Scala will be developed more quickly and with greater quality.

Experience required:

• A minimum of 4 years experience in writing Java programs with a focus on data processing applications and the use of open source software using libraries like Apache Lucene and Solr.
• A detailed knowledge of SQL and JDBC.
• A focus on producing software tools as a means to increase productivity.
• A substantial committer to one or more open source projects.
• A track record of being able to communicate technically to a wide audience.
• A personality suited to working in a team but with the ability to lead rapid software design and development as needs require.
• An excellent standard of written and spoken English.
• A history of permanent employment as opposed to contracting.

The following experience is desirable, though not essential

• The Scala language.
• System admin skills for Linux servers.
• Experience with Amazon Web Services.
• Experience with MySQL.

Terms:

Salary: Maximum £45,000.

Holiday: 5 weeks.

Location: City University London, 167-173 Goswell Road, London, EC1V 7HD.

To apply please send a one page cover email explaining why you want to work for the Bureau and briefly outlining why you are particularly suited to this role. Please also attach your CV. This should be sent to [email protected]. Please put Tech Lead 0.1 in the subject of the email.