Director of Technology

We are looking for a technologist to help lead the Tiny News Collective.

The Tiny News Collective works to make news entrepreneurship accessible and achievable to more people from a much broader range of professional, educational and lived experiences than are currently represented in our media ecosystem. We provide the tools, resources and commonwealth of knowledge to help people build sustainable news organizations that reflect and serve their communities. We support voices historically excluded from media and media ownership.

We look for deeply collaborative people who share our commitment to building a more equitable future for local journalism. We welcome applicants from a broad range of professional and education backgrounds. If you feel like you’d be a good fit but you’re worried that your experience might not be exactly aligned with what we’ve posted in this job description, please consider applying anyway.

Job description
The director of technology oversees the entire technology operation at the Tiny News Collective: managing the technology team, setting the roadmap and vision for technology at the collective, maintaining relationships with our third-party vendors, looking for new opportunities to provide critical technology, and ensuring a quality user experience. This is a leadership role within the Tiny News Collective, setting the general direction and ensuring the sustainability of the project.

A core offering of the Tiny News Collective is the Tiny News Platform, which is a complete digital news publishing system, including web publishing, newsletters, membership, ads, analytics, comments and more. The director of technology will be responsible for ensuring the platform continues to grow and serve the needs of the collective's membership. We hope to expand the platform into a SAAS product.

We've built the platform in JavaScript with a next.js frontend and a GraphQL-based backend. We interface with this stack in a variety of ways, including a Google Apps Script project that allows members to publish content directly from Google Docs. We also work with a number of third parties, including Letterhead, MonkeyPod and The Coral Project.

This role combines hands-on programming, high-level technical strategy, and management. The director of technology will have broad leeway to determine how development on the platform occurs, including release strategy, issue management, code review process, QA practices, and growing the technical team.

Position Type: Full time

Compensation: $140,000

Location: Remote, must be able to work in United States

Team: The director of technology will work closely with and report to the executive director and manage the technology team.

Application deadline: Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis.

Responsibilities

• Set the vision and roadmap for the future of the Tiny News Platform.
• Oversee development through sprint planning, prioritizing issues, reviewing code and contributing major features to the platform.
• Manage relationships with third-party technology partners and forge more critical technology partnerships to serve our members.
• Help our engineers realize their full potential through mentorship and frequent check-ins.
• Work closely with the executive director to maintain a healthy workplace culture, grow the technology team and recruit future engineers.
• Report to Tiny News Collective membership on progress with the platform and gather feedback to inform future development.

Skills, experience and interests

• You are fluent in writing code on both the server-side and the client-side for the web. This project is primarily built on next.js and various Node.js services, so you should have some experience working with reactive JavaScript libraries and Node.js.
• You have taken technical projects from conception to completion efficiently and effectively.
• You have experience owning technical projects and being responsible for code quality, testing, and performance.
• You have some experience working with web publishing. We are open to a wide range of experiences here, whether working with journalism, communications, activism, creators, or some other form of web publishing.
• You are eager to build a SAAS product that provides great customer service and provides value for customers.
• You are comfortable working with a remote team.
• You proactively communicate about your work.
• You are a collaborative listener and team member.

Benefits

• Employer-sponsored health and retirement plans.
• $500 annual technology and work tools allowance.
• 20 days paid vacation, not including health days.
• 10 company holidays each year, in addition to the week between Christmas Day and New Year's Day.
• Flexible work schedule—TNC is an entirely remote organization with team members in many time zones. Beyond the need for meetings and events we all need to be remotely present for, we are flexible with schedules and employees work wherever they see fit.