This job ad has been posted over 40 days ago! (*)
The Overview Project, an open-source document mining system, is looking for a front end developer
Overview is designed to quickly sift through large sets of disorganized documents — thousands or hundreds of thousands of pages. The software analyzes the full text of each document using natural language processing techniques, automatically sorts documents into topics and sub-topics, and visualizes their content. It has been used to report on emails, declassified archives, tweets, and more. There is no faster way to understand what’s in those 10,000 pages you got back from a FOIA request, or those 100,000 tweets you painstakingly captured.
Unlike a search engine, Overview helps you find what you don’t even know you’re looking for. Overview is a project of the Associated Press, funded by a Knight News Challenge grant. The system is in beta at www.overviewproject.org.
We need an additional front-end developer on the team. Overview is written in Scala on the Play framework, with a Coffeescript front end. We’re looking for:
- Solid JavaScript engineering experience, with frameworks such as jQuery, Coffeescript, and Backbone
- Experience with a modern MVC web app architecture, such as Rails, Django, or Play
- Familiarity with open source development; both the tools (e.g. Github) and the culture
- Design and usability sense; we have a designer, but you’ll still be making many decisions at the intersection of beauty and function.
- An understanding of web application architecture, including server operation and SQL database design
- Experience in visualization, natural language processing, or distributed systems a plus.
Perks include travel to data journalism conferences and flexible working arrangements. New York City area preferred, but will consider remote.
But mostly, we’re looking for someone who wants to build something they care about. Open data is great, but transparency means nothing if no one is watching. Our goal is to make it easy and cheap to sort through large volumes of unstructured text.
Send resumes to jonathan@overviewproject.org