Position: Investigative Data Developer (Russian Speaker)
Company: OCCRP
Category: Python
Experience required: 3y
English level: fluent
Published: 2022-03-01T00:00:00+02:00

We are looking for an experienced python developer to join OCCRP’s data team. Our projects help investigative journalists to access vast amounts of data and to unravel complex stories about corruption and fraud. You will join a team of data specialists who use a variety of techniques to acquire, munge and analyze data needed for follow-the-money investigations. This role will work closely with iStories and our Russian speaking journalists so fluent spoken and written Russian and English are essential.

This position is not opened for applicants residing in Russia. Fully remote, you must be able to work from 9am-5pm CET.

**Position Overview**
Expect to spend your time scraping company registries, accessing APIs, ingesting leaks and manipulating SQL databases. A large part of the role involves working with Aleph - OCCRP’s investigative data platform with over two billion entities from leaks, company and property registries and public records. You will clean and process the data, making it available and searchable on Aleph. You will help journalists to use Aleph and make sense of data. This could be running cross references to find the overlap with other data, or doing statistical analysis and calculations to provide the reporters with the information they need. This work is invaluable to our reporting - you will be an essential player in finding leads and supporting stories that hold those in power to account.

You will be trained to work in-depth with Aleph and the data team’s ecosystem of tooling and scraping workflows. Security is of the utmost importance considering the sensitivity of some of the data we work with and you will be required to adhere to our strict security standards.

**Responsibilities**
The kinds of work you will be expected to perform include:
- Supporting journalists to work with data in their investigations by understanding what they are trying to do, scoping the project, and working with other technical colleagues to deliver it.
- Handling communications back and forth in easy-to-understand language, tracking queries and documenting your work.
- Building data extraction and cleaning solutions for specific datasets using web crawlers and cleaning and importing leaked datasets.
- Assisting in maintaining and improving existing crawlers and datasets as needed.
- Analyzing and summarizing new leaks, finding angles for stories, exploring and communicating key connections and leads, suggesting other relevant resources.
- Liaising with the Aleph product team to coordinate on investigative needs and with the Research Team on overlapping research and stories.
- Exploring improved ways for journalists to understand and interface with OCCRP’s diverse data sources.

**Essential Skills:**
- Adept at basic statistical methods
- Passion for writing clean and maintainable code in Python and documenting work
- Comfortable working with SQL databases (we use PostgreSQL)
- Comfortable with configuration management (Git, yaml, Makefile)
- Skilled with Linux: bash, basic networking
 - Expert web scraping: good understanding of HTTP, HTML, CSS, Javascript
- Strong grasp of operational security
- Ability to communicate effectively and express ideas in a clear and concise manner. Russian language proficiency as well as proficiency in English.
- Ability to manage expectations in a fluid environment
- Ability to work well with people from a range of countries, languages and backgrounds, online and in person.

**Desirable Skills:**
- Familiar with Docker and Kubernetes
- Practiced in ElasticSearch, Kibana, Logstash
- Competent with Google Cloud

**Essential Experience:**
- At least 5 years working on data-centric projects
- At least 3 years of web scraping experience

**Desirable Experience:**
- Experience managing data projects with a diverse team
- Experience teaching data skills to non-technical people
- Experience working on civic technology or data journalism projects with journalists and activists
- Familiarity with finding and working with public records and registers in the Russian-speaking countries.