Director, Product Engineering

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

ProPublica, the nation’s leading nonprofit investigative newsroom, is seeking a director of product engineering to steward the technology and teams behind our core digital products — including our publishing systems, main website, data pipelines and infrastructure. This vital role amplifies our mission of publishing web-first journalism with real-world impact by ensuring our platforms are scalable, efficient and user-centric.

We’re looking for an engineering leader who thrives in a multifaceted role that balances strategic technical leadership with hands-on development. Reporting to the senior director of technology, you will manage a dedicated team of product engineers while collaborating closely with designers, product managers, data analysts and agency partners. You will champion engineering excellence, prioritizing speed, reliability, security and interoperability, while establishing the standards and processes that drive continuous improvement.

Key Responsibilities

• Directly manage and mentor a team of software engineers, including leading the performance management process and providing regular feedback.
• Foster a collaborative, inclusive, kind engineering culture that promotes learning, innovation and technical excellence.
• Collaborate with the senior director of technology on major technical infrastructure decisions, security implementations and strategic engineering planning.
• Contribute to technology strategy discussions and provide engineering perspective on product decisions.
• Establish and maintain engineering standards, best practices and coding guidelines across all product development, ensuring scalability, maintainability and security.
• Directly commit code where necessary alongside software engineers, leading by example with best practices and approaches.
• Drive continuous improvement in development processes, including code review practices, testing strategies and deployment pipelines.
• Manage technical debt and refactoring initiatives to maintain code quality and system health.
• Implement and maintain development workflows, including CI/CD pipelines, testing automation and deployment strategies.
• Ensure engineering work uses open standards where appropriate, meets accessibility requirements and is performant.

Required Qualifications

• Seven-plus years of software engineering experience with at least three years in engineering management.
• Demonstrated success managing and mentoring engineering teams of three to eight people in lean, scrappy environments.
• Strong background in the modern web development stack, including front-end frameworks like SvelteKit, back-end systems written in Python and PHP, and AWS/Google Cloud (particularly data pipelines, with services like Dagster and BigQuery).
• Deep understanding and ability to apply core web principles including open standards, performance optimization and accessibility.
• Strong knowledge and ability to apply data security and privacy best practices.
• Experience with agile development methodologies and DevOps practices.
• Proven track record of running and scaling effective, sustainable teams in mission-driven organizations.
• Experience with hiring, performance management and career development for technical staff.
• Experience building consumer-facing digital products, preferably in media, journalism or mission-driven organizations.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in journalism, media or nonprofit technology environments.
• Background with content management systems like WordPress, digital publishing platforms or news applications.
• Familiarity with data visualization and interactive storytelling technologies.
• Experience with security considerations for protecting sources and sensitive information.

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.

The expected salary range for this position is $170,000 to $180,000.

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.