Salary

£40,000 - £52,000

Location

Remote first with an office available in Central London and regular team meetings in the office

Reporting to

Andy Dudfield

Employment Type

Permanent

We are happy to talk about flexible working, [including part time].

Application Closing Date

06/02/2023

Introduction to the role

As a Software Engineer at Full Fact, you will make sure those who make false claims in public can’t get away with it.

This is a rare opportunity to work for a non-profit, backed by Google.org, tackling internet scale problems with a global user base.

You will be working on large scale and highly used software products. The fact checks our users publish are seen 100s of millions of times each year and embedded in many of the most well known internet services.

Every day fact checkers around the world find, check and challenge false claims identified by AI enabled software produced by Full Fact. Your job will be to help us improve this software for our growing user base.

Whether you're responding to a new feature request from users in Nigeria covering a general election, helping fact checkers in Australia fact check politicians in real time, or ensuring health focused charities can identify and reduce harmful content spreading online, you will be working at pace and on projects that make a substantial difference in the world using modern technology and good quality engineering practices. In this role that means day to day working with our Google Cloud infrastructure, building APIs and writing Python code.

We will support you to keep learning in this role and there are lots of opportunities for that. It is an exciting time to join Full Fact. We have recently received a substantial grant from Google.org to enable us to grow the team and accelerate our work. You will be joining a team of 8 other technical, data and product specialists and be responsible for delivering the code and infrastructure we need to support more and more fact checkers using the technology we are developing.

This is your chance to help solve important problems with good tech and a supportive team. Applications close 06/02/23.


If you are interested in applying but not sure you have all the skills, please do apply. We are open both to supporting learning on the job and to rearranging tasks within the team to suit the skillsets of the best applicant

Job Definition

As a Full Fact software engineer you’ll be responsible for writing software to support global fact checkers and deploying it in the cloud. This will involve:

• Building software that forms the backend of the systems used by our fact checkers to support them in deciding what to check and doing so quickly.

• Maintaining and scaling the necessary cloud infrastructure that supports the software as more and more people use it.

• Helping to monitor the services you build and identify and fix issues in the production environment.

We work with a wide range of technologies, but for this role we are looking for someone with

• A strong understanding and practical experience of Python

• Significant experience working with REST frameworks and ideally experience working with Flask

• Experience with Docker or similar orchestration tools

• Experience of working with SQL databases and ideally Postgres

• Strong experience of cloud based deployment, ideally via Google Cloud Platform

• Any working knowledge of Kubernetes would be a bonus as would experience working with Hashicorp tools.

Outcomes

• Improving the core platform, APIs and infrastructure that power our fact checking software

• The software you build is made available to fact checkers around the world.

What we are looking for from you

Political impartiality and sensitivity:

You are committed to the political neutrality of our work and have a good understanding of impartiality (please see the rules on our website).

Understanding of public debate in the UK and sensitivity to the political context we work in.

Personal skills/competencies

• You are comfortable working in an Agile way

• You are an excellent communicator and can explain the concepts behind your work to a non technical audience.

• You should be excited about pushing forward the state of the art for automated fact checking

What we offer

Starting salary of £40,000 - £52,000 depending on experience.

Workplace Pension

Generous holidays

• 25 days holiday plus bank holidays.

• In addition, we close the office for a period between Christmas and New Year.

• Day off for moving home.

Comfortable, centrally located London office with good transport links.

Employee Assistance Programme.

How to apply

Upload your CV and cover letter using the link below by 10am on Monday [06/02/23]

Our recruitment platform will remove identifying details such as email addresses to allow us to sift applications anonymously

Before applying, please read the requirements we place on staff to protect Full Fact’s independence and non-partisanship. https://fullfact.org/get-involved/jobs/#standards

How the application process will work

We want to see you at your best to understand your strengths and the contribution you could make at Full Fact with strong support, including for your learning and development. We also want to make sure that we use your time well during this process and don’t ask for more from you than we need to. We will make any reasonable adjustments we need to make to this process to help ensure you can perform at your best. For more information about this before applying, please contact jobs@fullfact.org.

The interview panel will be Will Moy, our CEO, Kate Wilkinson (Senior Product Manager) and Andy Dudfield (Head of Full Fact AI). You will also meet with David Corney, our Tech Lead for an additional pair programming technical task.

The process starts off with an anonymised covering letter and CV. This will be read by at least two people to produce a shortlist for interview.

The first round interviews will be a phone (not video) interview, lasting no more than half an hour, at a time that’s convenient for you. We will record it so at least two people can review each interview to decide who we invite back for the second round. The recordings will be deleted at the end of the process.

The second round will include a structured interview and a technical presentation of a task which assumes no prior knowledge. The task can be completed prior to the interview, at a time that most suits you.

The final interview will be with the full panel by video and last no more than an hour. We’ll tell you everything you need to know to prepare, including anything we’d recommend reading in advance.