Software Engineer | State and Power
Remote, London or Oregon | Full-Time or Long-Term Contract | $14,000-$20,000 per month depending on experience
State and Power is looking for a Software Engineer to join our growing international team and help build the technology behind an independent politics, geopolitics and global affairs publication.
This is a role for someone who wants to build, not simply maintain.
We are developing State and Power as more than a conventional news website. Alongside our journalism, we are building research products, structured political and institutional data, new ways of navigating complex global stories, internal editorial tools and technology that helps a distributed newsroom research and publish more effectively.
You would join a 17-person core team distributed globally, supported by a further 10 contractors, including four people currently working across engineering.
The role can be fully remote or based from one of our offices in London or Oregon.
What We’re Building
State and Power covers politics, geopolitical power, government, international institutions, economics, technology and the forces shaping how countries and societies operate.
Our goal is to build a publication that combines the speed of digital journalism with deeper research, institutional knowledge and useful long-term information architecture.
State and Power already reaches more than 100,000 visitors per month, and our ambition is to build toward a platform capable of reaching 10 million monthly visitors.
That means we are not only looking for engineers who can ship features quickly. We need people who can think about what happens when traffic, content volume, data requirements, search visibility and infrastructure grow by orders of magnitude.
We want to build systems that work well today but are designed with that future scale in mind.
A few examples of our work:
Europe Is Spending More on Defence. Strategic Autonomy Still Requires Political Autonomy
https://stateandpower\.com/europe/europe\-defence\-spending\-ukraine\-strategic\-autonomy\-2026
Canada’s Europe Turn Is What Hedging Against America Looks Like
https://stateandpower\.com/americas/canada\-eu\-alliance\-carney\-trump\-trade\-2026
A New Global Poll Suggests Middle Powers Have an Opening
https://stateandpower\.com/world/global\-trust\-us\-china\-middle\-powers\-poll\-2026
We are also developing recurring editorial products such as The Week in Power, which brings together the political, geopolitical and institutional developments we believe matter most each week:
https://stateandpower\.com/week\-in\-power
The engineering challenge is to build the infrastructure that allows products like these to become deeper, faster, more useful and more scalable.
What You’d Work On
There isn’t a narrow list of tickets waiting for you.
You’ll work with our existing engineering, editorial and leadership teams to decide what we should build next and how we should build it.
Depending on your strengths, that could include:
- Building new reader-facing products and features
- Improving the core State and Power publishing platform
- Creating tools for journalists and researchers
- Developing systems for structured political, institutional and geopolitical data
- Building APIs and data pipelines
- Improving article discovery, topic architecture and internal linking
- Developing better search and research functionality
- Improving technical SEO, performance and Core Web Vitals
- Building automated publishing and editorial workflows
- Creating internal monitoring and intelligence tools
- Integrating third-party datasets and information sources
- Experimenting with AI-assisted research, classification and editorial tooling
- Improving analytics and understanding how readers interact with our work
- Helping us design the technical foundations for future subscription, research and professional products
Some projects will be highly visible reader-facing features. Others might save our editorial team hours of repetitive work every week.
Both matter.
Building for Scale
A major part of this role is helping us prepare State and Power for a much larger audience.
We are already operating at 100,000+ monthly visitors, and we want the platform to be capable of supporting 10 million monthly visitors as the publication grows.
That means thinking seriously about:
- Performance under significantly higher traffic
- Efficient rendering and caching strategies
- Database and API performance
- Infrastructure reliability
- Search and indexing at much larger content volumes
- Cost-efficient scaling
- Monitoring and observability
- Content-delivery architecture
- Resilience during major breaking-news traffic spikes
- Avoiding technical decisions that work at 100,000 visitors but become bottlenecks at 1 million or 10 million
We do not expect every engineer to arrive having built a 10-million-user platform already.
But we do want people who understand the difference between building something that works and building something that can keep working as usage grows dramatically.
The Kind of Engineer We’re Looking For
We’re less interested in finding somebody who matches a rigid technology checklist than somebody who can look at a problem, understand why it matters and work out a sensible way to solve it.
You’ll probably enjoy this role if you like relatively high levels of ownership.
We’re particularly interested in engineers who:
- Have built real production software used by real users
- Are comfortable moving between frontend and backend problems
- Can understand an unfamiliar codebase quickly
- Care about performance, reliability and maintainability
- Think about scale, not just immediate implementation
- Enjoy solving ambiguous problems rather than only executing predefined tickets
- Can explain technical trade-offs to non-engineers
- Are interested in publishing, politics, research, data or information products
- Know when a simple solution is better than an elaborate one
- Are comfortable working asynchronously with an internationally distributed team
- Like experimenting, but can distinguish useful experimentation from unnecessary complexity
You do not need previous experience working for a newspaper or media organisation.
Experience building SaaS products, research platforms, data products, marketplaces, content systems or startup products could all translate well.
Technology
Our current environment includes technologies and tools such as:
- TypeScript
- JavaScript
- React
- Next.js
- Node.js
- Git and GitHub
- Vercel
- SQL and modern databases
- REST APIs
- Structured data
- Analytics infrastructure
- Modern web performance and technical SEO tooling
- AI APIs and automation workflows
Experience across the entire stack is not expected.
Strong engineering fundamentals and the ability to learn quickly matter considerably more than having every technology on your CV.
Engineering Inside a Newsroom
One of the things that makes this role different is the proximity between engineering and the rest of the organisation.
You won’t be several layers removed from the people using what you build.
An editor might identify a research process that takes four hours and could be reduced to ten minutes.
A recurring State and Power product might need its own data architecture.
A major geopolitical event might expose a completely new way readers should be able to navigate countries, politicians, institutions or previous coverage.
A research project might begin as an internal database and eventually become a public product.
We want engineering to be involved in those conversations early.
The best solution may be a new application. Sometimes it may be an API, an automation, a database, a small interface or twenty lines of code that eliminate an unnecessary workflow.
A Small Team With Real Ownership
State and Power currently operates with a 17-person core team spread across multiple countries, alongside 10 contractors supporting different parts of the organisation.
Four of those contractors currently work within engineering.
That means you’ll have other technical people to work with, but the team is still small enough that an individual engineer can have a significant effect on the product.
You won’t be engineer number 400 maintaining one subsection of a platform.
You’ll be able to influence architecture, suggest products, question existing systems and take ownership of meaningful parts of what State and Power becomes.
Location and Working Structure
The position can be:
- Fully remote
- Based from our London office
- Based from our Oregon office
Our wider team is internationally distributed, so much of our collaboration is already designed around remote and asynchronous work.
The position can be structured as either a full-time role or a long-term contract, depending on location and circumstances.
Expected compensation is $14,000-$20,000 per month, depending on experience, technical depth and level of responsibility.
Why State and Power?
We’re still early enough that many of the most interesting systems have not been built yet.
The opportunity isn’t simply to improve an existing publication. It is to help determine what a modern digital publication can become when journalism, research, structured information, data and software are designed together.
We already have a meaningful audience. The next challenge is turning that into a global-scale publication.
Growing from 100,000+ monthly visitors toward 10 million will require much more than producing more journalism. It will require stronger discovery systems, faster infrastructure, better data architecture, deeper products and technology that can cope with significantly larger audiences without sacrificing reliability or speed.
That is the problem we want this engineering team to help solve.
Over time, we expect the technical side of State and Power to expand considerably beyond the website itself.
That creates room for the right engineer to take ownership of substantial areas of our product and technical roadmap as the organisation grows.
Applying
Apply through the LinkedIn application on this listing.
We’d particularly like to see:
- Your CV or LinkedIn profile
- A short explanation of what you have built previously
- GitHub, portfolio or product links where available
- Examples of production features or systems you personally worked on
- The technologies you are strongest with
- Your current location
- Whether you prefer remote work, London or Oregon
You do not need to match every technology or requirement above.
We would rather speak with a strong engineer who has built interesting things, thinks independently and wants substantial ownership than someone whose CV simply contains every keyword in our stack.
State and Power:
https://stateandpower.com
