Software Engineer Consultant (freelance)

Application deadline has passed

November 20, 2024

We are looking for a freelance Software Engineer Consultant to help enhance our tool, the Auto Archiver, which enables the open source community, as well as journalists and researchers, to easily archive online content.

Who We Are

Bellingcat is an independent collective of international researchers using open source and social media investigations to probe conflict, corruption, crimes, disinformation, extremist groups and much, much more. We have received multiple awards for our research and publications that shine a light on wrongdoing. Our community (which includes staff, contributors and volunteers around the world) works in a unique field where technology, forensic research, journalism and the advancement of justice and accountability come together.

Our Auto Archiver (AA) is a Python command line tool that can be used to scrape, archive and preserve online content during open source investigations. To date, it has archived thousands of links for hundreds of people across journalistic, academic, activist and civil society organisations.

Who You Are

We are looking for a freelance Software Engineer Consultant to improve our Auto Archiver tool from January/December 2024 to February/March 2025 for 2-5 days per week (flexible in terms of the exact days and times of the week and fully remote).

Responsibilities

  • Revise the current code implementation of the AA for technical and security improvements, draft a plan of changes alongside Bellingcat’s tech team;
  • Implement unit and integration tests for the AA;
  • Implement a continuous integration workflow on the project’s GitHub, optionally optimise the current continuous deployment workflow;
  • Test and implement archiving strategies for both new and existing websites and social media platforms;
  • Improve documentation to make the tool more accessible; 

Requirements

  • Advanced Python development skills. Must be familiar with common software patterns, code smells, and testing libraries;
  • Comfortable with Git and GitHub.

Experience with any of the following is a plus: 

  • Scraping tools and techniques (strong plus); 
  • Webrecorder’s Browsertrix Crawler (strong plus);
  • Docker;
  • Google APIs; 
  • S3-like storage systems.

What We Offer

The freelance fee is between 400 and 500€ per day gross (depending on the candidate’s level of the candidate’s software engineering experience). The consultant is responsible for paying taxes and any other charges according to the regulations in their country of residence.

How to Apply

Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis, with the first round of reviews on November 21, 2024. The final deadline is November 30, 2024. Please send your resume to contact-tech@bellingcat.com with the subject line: Software Engineer Consultant.

Feel free to email us with any questions about this position!