Straight Arrow is on a mission to restore trust in the news by delivering fair, fact-based journalism in a media landscape that too often prioritizes outrage over accuracy. Our small but mighty technology team builds and maintains the platforms that make this mission possible — from the SAN.com web experience to our mobile apps and the infrastructure that ties it all together. We move fast, build thoughtfully, and believe the right engineer can make an outsized difference.

About the Role

We're looking for a Mid-Level Web Software Engineer who brings solid technical chops and a genuine desire to keep growing. This role sits at the intersection of front-end craft, back-end integration, and DevOps awareness. The work is very public-facing - the code you write will be seen by SAN's audience every day, so we care as much about the experience you ship as the systems you help maintain. You’ll be expected to own features end-to-end—from implementation through deployment and monitoring—while contributing to overall system reliability and engineering quality.

If you have a growth mindset, love owning problems end-to-end, and want to work somewhere your contributions actually matter, read on.

What You'll Do

Build and maintain the SAN.com web ecosystem

You'll work across the full web stack — implementing front-end features, making style and UX improvements, tackling more structural projects, and building API integrations. You'll help ensure the site stays fast, polished, and reliable.

Strengthen the codebase with testing and CI/CD improvements

You'll help raise the quality floor — writing tests, identifying gaps in coverage, and making improvements to our continuous integration and delivery pipelines. We believe good DevOps habits are part of being a good engineer, and you'll lean into that.

Collaborate across the engineering team

You'll work with engineers across disciplines to develop cross-platform solutions to shared problems. We're a small team, which means your ideas reach the table quickly and your work doesn't get lost in a queue.

Delight our users through thoughtful product work

You'll partner with user management initiatives and take on new projects aimed squarely at improving the customer experience. We're customer-obsessed here, and we want you to be too.

Requirements

• 3-5 years of experience building and shipping customer-facing products
• 3-5 years of experience building websites with WordPress, including theme and plugin development
• 3-5 years of experience expanding site functionality with React
• 2+ years of experience building APIs to power mobile or cross-platform applications

Nice To Haves

• Experience with web performance optimization
• Experience working with user subscription / management systems (such as piano)
• Familiarity with accessibility standards (WCAG) and compliance practices
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or similar) and CDN configuration
• Experience implementing analytics, feature flags, or experimentation frameworks

Why Straight Arrow

• End-to-end ownership - you’re invested in your code all the way from local setup to production
• A mission that matters: building technology in service of better journalism
• A small team where bureaucracy is minimal, your work is visible, and your voice carries
• Room to grow — into DevOps, into platform work, into wherever your curiosity takes you

Straight Arrow is on a mission to restore trust in the news by delivering fair, fact-based journalism in a media landscape that too often prioritizes outrage over accuracy. Our small but mighty technology team builds and maintains the platforms that makes this mission possible, from the SAN.com mobile apps to the web experience and the infrastructure that ties it all together. We move fast, build thoughtfully, and believe the right engineer can make an outsized difference.

The Role

We're hiring a Senior Software Engineer specializing in React Native development for our customer-facing mobile app, built and shipped in tandem with work on the Straight Arrow website. You will own the mobile codebase end-to-end — from the React Native and Expo layer all the way down to native bridges we've already built into iOS and Android.

This is a deeply hands-on role. We're looking for an engineer whose primary impact is the code itself: the architecture you choose, the patterns you set in the codebase, the bugs you don't ship, the bar you hold in code review. But you'll also be a force multiplier for the entire engineering team, partnering with product, design, QA, and our web engineers to turn complex problems into shipped products.

If you're a strong senior engineer who's also been the person teammates lean on for technical direction, code review, mentorship, and "let me show you how I'd approach that," this role is built for you.

What You'll Do

• Build new experiences that delight customers.
• Own architecture and day-to-day development of our React Native / Expo mobile application.
• Partner closely with our API engineers, not as a downstream consumer, but as a co-author of requirements and contracts.
• Work side-by-side with the web engineering team to ship cohesive, parallel experiences across platforms; coordinate shared patterns, shared concerns, and shared deadlines.
• Collaborate daily with product, design, and QA to translate ambiguous customer problems into clean, shippable solutions.
• Set the technical bar for the mobile codebase through architecture, code review, testing strategy, performance work, accessibility, and release engineering.
• Mentor and uplevel other engineers and act as a force multiplier rather than a single point of throughput.
• Drive technical decisions with a relentless customer focus: what we ship has to work, in the real world, on real devices, for real users.

What We're Looking For

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, with substantial recent experience in React Native development.
• Deep, demonstrated expertise with React Native across both iOS and Android, including the practical realities of cross-platform development (platform differences, native modules, performance, app store release processes).
• Hands-on experience using Expo as a development platform - managed workflow, EAS Build / Submit / Update, and the tradeoffs involved.
• Ability to write and maintain native bridges - comfort dropping into Swift/Objective-C and Kotlin/Java when needed.
• A strong customer focus, with a track record of building customer-facing enterprise applications that real people depend on.
• Experience working with an API, helping define requirements, shape contracts, and contribute to implementation decisions.
• Demonstrated technical leadership as a senior IC: setting architectural direction, raising code quality through review and example, and helping less-senior engineers grow through pairing and technical guidance.
• Excellent collaboration skills with cross-functional partners in product, design, QA, and adjacent engineering teams.
• Strong written and verbal communication; comfort operating autonomously in a fully remote environment.

Nice to Have

• Experience integrating with a WordPress backend.
• Experience with user management and subscription / paywall platforms such as Piano.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and mobile-specific delivery (TestFlight, Play Console, OTA updates via EAS).
• Experience working with consent management systems.
• Experience shipping in a media, news, or content-heavy product environment.

Why This Role

• Small, focused team — your work and your judgment will be visible from day one.
• Real ownership of a customer-facing mobile codebase, not a slice of someone else's roadmap.
• Cross-functional partnership with product, design, QA, and web teams — fewer silos, more impact.
• Mission-driven work in a media environment that takes its responsibility to readers seriously.

The Straight Arrow Mindset

• Customer-focused - you realize that a great user experience is critical to the success of the company.
• Data-driven - understanding the importance of good data in driving product decisions.
• Collaborative - you brainstorm with fellow engineers to come up with solutions to problems. You work effectively with stakeholders, translating business needs into technical solutions.
• Learning-Oriented: You stay current with best practices and emerging mobile technologies.

Compensation & Benefits

• The salary range for this position is $150,000-$165,000, depending on experience and qualifications.
• SAN offers comprehensive health and wellness coverage that ensures our employees have the care and coverage they need to stay healthy, build current and future financial security and maintain work-life balance. All full-time employees and their dependents are eligible to enroll in our benefits. That includes generous paid time off, paid holidays and floating holidays; health coverage, vision and dental plans; retirement plans like the company's 401(k) plan with company match; and more.

Straight Arrow is on a mission to restore trust in the news by delivering fair, fact-based journalism in a media landscape that too often prioritizes outrage over accuracy. Our small but mighty technology team builds and maintains the platforms that makes this mission possible, from the SAN.com web experience to our mobile apps and the infrastructure that ties it all together. We move fast, build thoughtfully, and believe the right engineer can make an outsized difference.

About the Role

We're looking for a Senior Software Engineer who thrives at the intersection of Software, Platform, and Product. This is a high-trust, high-ownership role: you'll be the person our team leans on to make hard technical calls, clear blockers, and elevate everyone around you.

You'll have an impact on the full SAN.com ecosystem — our AWS infrastructure, web and mobile codebases, AI initiatives, and internal tooling. If you're energized by broad scope, enjoy R&D-style exploration as much as production engineering, and want to have a real impact on a growing media company, this role is for you.

What You’ll Do

Own our cloud footprint

You'll be the primary steward of Straight Arrow’s cloud infrastructure — architecting, provisioning, and maintaining our AWS & GCP cloud environments. This includes architecting, designing, and building full customer facing solutions in the cloud, leveraging CI/CD and IaC technologies, with consideration for security, scalability, reliability, and observability. 

Lead AI agent development and implementation

You'll own SAN's AI agents end-to-end: scoping, building, and integrating them meaningfully into our products and workflows. This is a genuine opportunity to shape how a newsroom leverages AI.

Build internal utilities and R&D

You'll accelerate all of SAN engineering by building internal platform products that save the team time, and help the organization move from "interesting idea" to "working thing" faster than we could without you.

Collaborate across Tech, Product, and Analytics leadership

You'll be a trusted technical voice in cross-functional conversations — helping translate business needs into engineering decisions and making sure leadership has what they need to make informed calls.

Be a force multiplier for the engineering team

You'll identify blockers before they compound, find shared solutions, and actively help the team work better together. Your impact will be measured as much by what you enable in others as by what you ship yourself. You'll invest in the growth of the engineers themselves through design discussions, code reviews, and just being someone they can learn from. 

Requirements

• Meaningful experience working within AWS, including serverless architectures (Lambda), infrastructure-as-code (Terraform/OpenTofu), and cloud cost/reliability management
• Experience working in mobile app or web development
• Comfortable working across a stack and across teams — this role requires breadth as much as depth
• Strong engineering fundamentals — you write clean, maintainable code and you know why it matters
• Demonstrated ability to lead technical projects from ambiguous problem to shipped solution
• Experience mentoring or leveling up other engineers

Nice To Haves

• Experience with Wordpress
• Experience with mobile application development in React Native / Expo.
• Experience with user / subscription management utilities (piano)
• Experience with vendor management, integrating with 3rd party utilities
• Exposure to vendor analysis
• Experience working in the media / journalism space

Why Straight Arrow:

• Real ownership, from day one
• A mission that matters: building technology in service of better journalism
• A small team where your work is visible and your voice carries
• The chance to shape both the technical culture and the product roadmap
• A chance to own new greenfield products end to end that positively impact both the internal teams and the customer

About this role:

Straight Arrow is looking for a Food and Agriculture Reporter to cover how America gets fed – and why that process has become a source of economic stress, political conflict and cultural confusion. This role focuses on the systems behind what we eat: farming, food production, supply chains, pricing, policy and environmental impact, and how those forces collide on grocery shelves and restaurant menus.

Food prices, supply‑chain disruptions, environmental pressures and debates over farming practices have become national flashpoints. At the same time, consolidation in agribusiness, antitrust enforcement, lawsuits and regulatory battles are reshaping the food economy behind the scenes, alongside shifting geopolitics. Americans feel the impact of these dynamics daily, but the mechanics are often hidden or reduced to partisan talking points. This reporter will dig into those mechanics, breaking original stories, exposing pressure points and decoding the narratives that surround them.

We’re looking for a reporter who can connect what happens on farms, in factories, in boardrooms and in courtrooms to the lived experience of everyone who eats – including how those forces surface in grocery aisles, restaurant menus and food culture more broadly. The ideal candidate has a strong scoop instinct, is comfortable working with documents and data, and can balance fast‑moving news with deeper enterprise and accountability reporting that makes sense of food both as an economic system and a cultural artifact.

This role applies to our core mission of exposing how systems and narratives shape people’s lives. In the food economy, that means showing how power structures and information framing determine what Americans eat and pay for, often without their knowledge.

Responsibilities:

• Break exclusive, original stories on food and agriculture, including pricing, consolidation, labor, regulation and industry practices.
• Report on farming, food production, and supply chains with attention to economic power, market dynamics and consumer impact.
• Investigate antitrust issues, lawsuits, regulatory enforcement actions, and government oversight related to agribusiness and the food system.
• Analyze how policy decisions, corporate behavior and environmental pressures shape food availability, affordability and the choices consumers ultimately see reflected in menus and food trends. 
• Use data, public records, court filings and regulatory documents to support enterprise and investigative reporting.
• Cover daily news, such as price swings, shortages, and legal or policy developments, with speed, clarity and context.
• Examine how food and agriculture issues are framed by media, industry groups and political actors – and what those narratives obscure.
• Regularly pitch story ideas for breaking news, explainers, and longer‑term investigations aligned with SAN’s mission.
• Develop sources across farming, agribusiness, restaurants, labor, government, legal and academic communities.
• Collaborate with editors and multimedia teams to translate reporting into digital, video and social formats.

Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in journalism, environmental studies, agriculture, economics, public policy, or a related field is preferred.
• 3-5 years of proven experience as a reporter covering food systems and agriculture.
• Demonstrated ability to generate scoops and exclusives through sourcing, records and persistence.
• Experience reporting on antitrust, litigation, regulatory agencies or corporate accountability is strongly preferred.
• Comfort working with data, public records and legal documents.
• Strong researching, writing, and storytelling skills; proficiency in AP Style.
• Ability to explain complex systems clearly without advocacy or oversimplification.
• Comfort working under tight deadlines while managing longer‑term enterprise projects.
• Familiarity with SEO, CMS tools (such as WordPress), and audience analytics.
• Experience with multimedia or cross‑platform journalism, or willingness to learn.
• Commitment to clarity, transparency and unbiased reporting.

Compensation & Benefits:

• The salary range for this position is $80,000-$100,000.
• Straight Arrow offers comprehensive health and wellness coverage that ensures our employees have the care and coverage they need to stay healthy, build current and future financial security and maintain work-life balance. All full-time employees and their dependents are eligible to enroll in our benefits. That includes generous paid time off, paid holidays and floating holidays; health coverage, vision and dental plans; retirement plans like the company's 401(k) plan with company match; and more.  

#LI-Remote

Job Summary

Straight Arrow News is seeking a Director of Social Media to lead social platforms as a core growth and engagement engine for the company. They will be responsible for using social media and social video to expand reach, deepen loyalty and drive measurable subscription growth for Straight Arrow’s journalism.

The director will own how Straight Arrow shows up on social platforms, including how stories are framed, how video is produced and tested, how audiences are built and how attention is converted into long‑term relationships with our journalism. They will manage a team of five social strategists and work closely with editors, video teams and growth leadership to ensure social content is built to perform. This position reports to the SVP of Marketing and Subscription Growth.

The ideal candidate is deeply fluent in how modern platforms actually work, from algorithms to retention mechanics, and has a proven track record of turning social attention into sustained engagement and revenue. This person should be as comfortable discussing hooks, completion rates, and cohort behavior as they are with editorial judgment and brand voice.

Key Responsibilities

• Own social media as a core driver of audience growth, engagement and subscriptions
• Set and execute platform‑specific strategies across major social platforms, with clear performance goals
• Lead the development and testing of social‑native and video‑first formats that drive reach, retention and sharing
• Work closely with editors, reporters and designers to translate journalism into compelling, platform‑optimized storytelling
• Build strategies that convert social audiences into repeat users, app users and paid subscribers
• Monitor and analyze social performance using analytics tools such as Hootsuite, Google Analytics and Parse.ly, and adjust strategies based on audience behavior
• Establish best practices for social packaging, voice and experimentation across the organization
• Manage, mentor and develop a team of social media strategists
• Collaborate with editorial, marketing, brand and tech leadership to align social strategy with broader growth goals
• Uphold Straight Arrow’s standards for credible, unbiased journalism across all social platforms

Desired Skills and Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience leading social media strategy and audience growth for a media company or publisher
• Proven track record using social platforms, especially social video, to drive meaningful engagement and subscription growth
• Deep understanding of how major social platforms and algorithms function, and techniques for building cult-like followings on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, X, Bluesky, YouTube and others
• Strong analytical instincts; comfortable using performance data to guide decisions and experimentation
• Experience managing and developing teams in a fast‑paced media environment
• Ability to balance journalistic integrity with platform‑native storytelling and optimization
• Familiarity with AP Style, SEO, CMS tools and audience analytics platforms
• Highly organized, detail‑oriented and comfortable working across teams and deadlines
• Collaborative, communicative and creative
• Strong interest in media, trust and audience behavior; strong understanding of the current media landscape

Compensation and Benefits

The salary range for this position is $137,000 to $150,000.

Straight Arrow News offers comprehensive health and wellness coverage that ensures our employees have the care and coverage they need to stay healthy, build current and future financial security and maintain work-life balance. All full-time employees and their dependents are eligible to enroll in our benefits. That includes generous paid time off, paid holidays and floating holidays; health coverage, vision and dental plans; retirement plans like the company's 401(k) plan with company match; and more.

About Straight Arrow

Straight Arrow is a publication dedicated to providing deeply reported stories about the biggest issues dividing Americans today, without bias or agenda. Our mission is to deliver clarity and context in a polarized media landscape. We are also building a new subscription-based business model, with exclusive reporting and analysis at its heart.

To apply, please submit your resume below. A cover letter is optional, but appreciated.

About this role:

SAN is hiring a remote Media, Bias and Algorithms Reporter to investigate how information is built, distributed, distorted and amplified in the digital age – and to explain it with clarity, not cynicism. This is not a traditional media‑industry beat. You won’t often cover newsroom shuffles or corporate M&A. You’ll probe the deeper machinery of the modern information environment: the recommendation engines behind what people see, the structural incentives that create bias (intentional or not), the platforms that mediate nearly every public conversation, and the invisible feedback loops that shape how society understands current events.

People increasingly experience the world through systems they don’t control and can barely see. Audiences know bias exists, but most have no way of understanding how it works or why narratives diverge so dramatically across outlets and platforms. Your reporting will give them that power. You’ll decode competing narratives, reveal blind spots in media framing, contextualize how algorithms elevate or suppress certain stories, and help audiences understand why people can see the same event as two different realities.

This beat taps directly into one of the country’s most widespread frustrations: navigating a chaotic information landscape where everyone senses distortion, but few understand its mechanics. It is central to SAN’s mission and a clear opportunity for differentiation, filling a gap the broader media rarely covers with depth or transparency. Your work will provide clarity where there is confusion, depth where there is noise, and context where there is polarization. If you want to help audiences see the whole board – not just the headlines – this is the beat for you.

Responsibilities:

• Explain the information ecosystem. Report how algorithms, platforms, search engines, news feeds, creators and publishers shape public perception, often in ways even they don’t fully understand.
• Decode bias and information flow. Track where narratives originate, why they spread, who benefits and what gets lost along the way.
• Investigate system design. Analyze how recommendation systems, ranking mechanisms, moderation policies and optimization goals influence what information rises to the top.
• Cover daily news with clarity and urgency. Produce quick‑turn analyses and explainers when narratives are forming; identify patterns early and contextualize them for a general audience.
• Create human‑centered stories. Connect systemic dynamics to real people – voters, parents, creators and communities – showing tangible impacts and tradeoffs.
• Demystify complexity. Make technical, structural and abstract concepts understandable without oversimplifying using plain language, sharp framing and transparent sourcing.
• Collaborate across formats. Work with visual, audio and video teams to turn reporting into compelling explainers, short documentaries, interactives and social‑native pieces.
• Use rigorous, transparent methods. Where appropriate, design lightweight tests, audits or replicable analyses; publish methodology boxes that explain what you did and what the limits are.
• Build a diverse source network. Develop relationships across platforms, search, trust & safety, recommendation, UX, policy, academia, creators and advocacy groups to stay ahead of emerging dynamics.

Qualifications:

• 7+ years of reporting experience spanning technology, media, platforms, digital culture, politics or information systems.
• A reporter’s instinct for pattern‑spotting, source‑building and asking questions that get to the structural “why,” not just the surface “what.”
• Working understanding of how systems like TikTok, YouTube, Google Search, Meta’s feeds, and X/Twitter surface and prioritize content (you don’t need to be an engineer, but you should understand the mechanics and incentives).
• Demonstrated ability to translate complex or technical topics into clear, trustworthy journalism for a general audience.
• Comfort with ambiguity and partial visibility; experience piecing together truth via interviews, documents, research, experiments and creative methodology.
• A track record of original, insightful reporting: features, investigations, data‑driven explainers and smart, quick‑turn analysis.
• Exceptional researching, writing and storytelling skills; skilled in AP Style.
• Knowledge of SEO and experience with CMS (e.g., WordPress) and analytics tools.
• Commitment to accuracy, clarity, and unbiased storytelling; meticulous about verification and transparency.
• Ability to work under tight deadlines and manage multiple assignments across formats and platforms.
• Experience with multimedia or cross‑platform journalism, or a strong willingness to learn.

Bonus Qualifications:

• Experience covering tech companies, platforms or digital culture.
• Familiarity with data journalism techniques (Excel/Sheets; comfort with basic scraping or Python/R is a plus but not required).
• Understanding of audience behavior, recommendation dynamics or media studies.
• Track record of spotting emerging narratives before they reach the mainstream.
• Experience with trust & safety, integrity or platform policy beats.

Compensation & Benefits:

• The salary range for this position is $90,000-$120,000.
• Straight Arrow News offers comprehensive health and wellness coverage that ensures our employees have the care and coverage they need to stay healthy, build current and future financial security and maintain work-life balance. All full-time employees and their dependents are eligible to enroll in our benefits. That includes generous paid time off, paid holidays and floating holidays; health coverage, vision and dental plans; retirement plans like the company's 401(k) plan with company match; and more.  

#LI-Remote

How (and what) to pitch Straight Arrow News

Straight Arrow News is open to excellent stories from freelance journalists. We welcome pitches that tackle important, timely topics in ways that will register with a national audience invested in reading unbiased reporting. 

We are actively seeking stories that can make local issues feel compelling to a national audience. For example, could a new law passed in one state be of interest to folks across the country facing similar issues? Has there been a breakdown of public services – trash, water quality, improper billing – in one city that can serve as an entry point into a national conversation? We love stories that offer solutions. 

Above all, we value original reporting that can take a national or local issue and, as we say, “Make It Matter”.

Typically, Straight Arrow News freelance stories fall into three categories:

• Standard features: Stories that require at least three sources interviewed and produce original reporting; typically 800-1,000 words. 
• Deep dives: Stories that require more than three sources interviewed, as well as analysis and data, which may be acquired via public records requests; typically 1,200 to 1,500 words. 
• Longform enterprise: Stories that require at least five sources to be interviewed, as well as intense analysis and the use of several data points, which are not readily available and for which the reporter smartly uses investigative skills to find a unique way to tell a story that hasn’t been reported elsewhere; may exceed 2,000 words.

To submit a freelance pitch to Straight Arrow News, please fill out this pitch form.