Lead Full Stack Developer (32-40 hours per week)

At Follow the Money we are looking for a Lead full stack developer to strengthen our team.

Follow the Money (FTM) is an independent platform for investigative journalism. We publish stories about power, money and interests. Working at FTM means you contribute to a greater purpose: strengthening democracy and holding power to account. Our editorial office is located on the Overtoom in Amsterdam (with the Vondelpark as our back garden). It is a dynamic place, where personal initiative is not only appreciated but essential. We also have an office in Brussels.

Follow the Money wants to become more independent of big tech. Not only for the software we use ourselves, we also want to be less dependent on social media. That is why we want to strengthen our own product (website, app, newsletters, etc.) and see opportunities in new alternatives such as the Fediverse.

Our members form the commercial foundation of Follow the Money. At present there are 50 thousand of them, but we want to grow to 100 thousand. Our websites (ftm.nl and ftm.eu), apps, editorial and CRM systems play a crucial role in this. We develop and manage these largely ourselves. That is why we are looking for a lead fullstack developer to strengthen our IT team.

Our IT team is small and close-knit. In this role you are therefore more than just a developer. You determine and safeguard the technical direction of our platform. At the same time, you do not shy away from IT infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines or connections with payment and other external systems. You concern yourself with reliability, security and scalability, and you feel comfortable with the responsibility that comes with that.

In addition, we are working with journalism platform De Correspondent on a project around digital autonomy. In doing so we are exploring how we can become less dependent on American technology and move to European alternatives. In this role you help think through the technical choices and system adjustments that this requires.

In short: in a small team you are the technical anchor. You safeguard the big picture and also like to roll up your sleeves yourself. You are a team player: you do not arrive at the theoretically best solution in 'splendid isolation', and you know when to be pragmatic.

You become part of our self-managing development team with a great deal of responsibility. There are no heavy consultation structures or layers at FTM, and we work closely with designers and editors. You report to the product owner. 

You sit in the editorial office and get a direct feel for the journalism we work on. As a result you also see that technical choices have a direct impact on how stories are published and read.

• You enjoy a startup-like working environment and feel comfortable in a real team. In large scrum teams, where everyone does a specialist part of the whole, you will probably not thrive as much. You actually enjoy keeping an overview and being involved in the whole platform. You can prepare decisions so that they can be discussed efficiently with the team and the management. 

• You have several years of experience building web applications and have been curious enough to also look beyond the code. You find it interesting to know how systems run, how they are secured and how you keep them reliable.

• You do not need to know everything, but you feel comfortable in conversations about infrastructure, architecture and technical choices. And when something goes wrong, you want to find out what is going on and not walk away from the problem.

• Experience with Symfony, TypeScript and MySQL is a welcome bonus, as they form the core of our sites and apps. At the very least you know PHP well.

• You feel at home on Linux servers and know how deployment pipelines work.

• Affinity with journalism, public information provision or digital autonomy is a plus.

• You speak fluent Dutch. A large part of your work consists of collaborating with editors and colleagues at our editorial office in Amsterdam.

• Working at Follow the Money means you build technology that directly contributes to our journalism. You work together with colleagues who make stories that matter.

• You get a lot of freedom and responsibility. We give you room to think along about architecture, infrastructure and digital autonomy. You have direct influence over a platform used by hundreds of thousands of people.

• At FTM, technology is not on the sidelines: it is an essential part of how we practise journalism. You therefore work closely with editors and designers.

• The position is classified under the Boeken- en Tijdschriftuitgeverijbedrijf job grading system, scale 6/7 of the CAO Uitgeverijbedrijf, with a gross salary from € 3,750 (depending on your knowledge and experience) based on 40 hours per week.

• We largely follow the CAO for the Publishing Industry, but also offer FTM-specific benefits to our employees. Think of our very attractive staff savings scheme and our pension provision,

• In consultation you can work partly from home, but presence at the editorial office is strongly preferred.

Apply via the 'solliciteer nu' button.

In the course of June we will invite candidates for an introductory meeting.

You can respond to this vacancy up to and including 23 June. After this date we will let you know whether you are invited. Do you have any questions? Then send an email to [contact details removed].

We look forward to your response!