Investigative Data Engineer

About Canada's National Observer

Canada's National Observer CNO) is an independent digital news site founded in 2015. CNO covers Canada's changing climate from newsrooms in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, Montreal, and Ottawa, with more than 35,000 articles published. 

In 2025, CNO developed a reporting tool, Civic Searchlight.

About Civic Searchlight

Civic Searchlight is a daily-refreshed, searchable transcript database covering more than 600 Canadian municipal councils, with map and timeline views and direct links back to source video. It's used by journalists at every major media organization, as well as researchers, government departments, universities and advocacy groups, and has already been nominated for some of Canada’s most prestigious journalism prizes — including the National Newspaper Award for Innovation in Journalism and the CJF-Hinton Prize for AI Safety Reporting. 

Job Description

We are looking to supercharge Civic Searchlight with new capabilities, and we need someone with the data skills to deliver them. This will require a high level of familiarity with software development and data engineering.

This job will involve a great deal of collaboration with our Technology and Democracy reporter, our Technical Lead and our editor-in-chief, all of whom are responsible for different sides of Civic Searchlight, so people skills will serve you well.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain features for our flagship application Civic Searchlight for investigative journalism and other use cases
• Discover new data sources and build pipelines to integrate them with existing infrastructure
• Implement rigorous monitoring and testing procedures so the database stays reliable as coverage grows
• Help build new tools on top of the database, including improved search, alerts, automated summaries and AI-assisted features
• Contribute to architectural decisions as we move from prototype-scale to production infrastructure

What we’re looking for

• Strong data engineering skills, including designing and maintaining pipelines from messy sources
• Experience with Python, Javascript, Svelte and SQL

• Experience with automated testing and continuous integration
• Comfortable developing collaboratively using git
• Resourceful – willing to take initiative and dig into unfamiliar problems with a track record of getting them done
• A bigger-picture thinker who can connect engineering decisions to journalistic and public-interest outcomes
• Bonus: experience with speech-to-text models, LLMs, cloud infrastructure

Preferred start date June 8, 2026

How to apply

Please submit your resume to the Bamboo HR link and respond to the four questions.

We look forward to hearing from you.