Code for Africa is recruiting a full-time Technical Evangelist to support our investigative journalism programmes, based out of our main civic technology lab in Nairobi, Kenya.
The African Network of Centers for Investigative Reporting (ANCIR) is an association of the continent’s best investigative newsrooms, ranging from large traditional mainstream media to smaller specialist units. ANCIR member newsrooms investigate crooked politicians, organised crime and big business. The initiative is incubated by Code for Africa (CfA) with support from the International Center for Journalists.
ANCIR seeks to strengthen newsrooms’ own internal capacity, by providing access to the world’s best whistleblower encryption and investigative semantic analysis technologies, as well as forensic research support, and seed grants for cross-border collaboration.
As Technical Evangelist, you will work with ANCIR newsrooms to give skills and tools to protect them against digital security vulnerabilities such as DDoS and digital snooping / spying, as well as misinformation, censorship and subversion. The role will see you connecting with journalists, media managers, and human rights hacktivists. You will engage with them face-to-face in community workshops or one-on-one mentoring partnerships, as well as via regular webinars and public presentations.
The ideal candidate possesses a combination of deep technical knowledge with strong public communications skills, exceptional initiative and self-management, and experience driving product adoption through direct user engagement and awareness-building.
You will also be adept at working as part of a geographically distributed pan-African team. Some travel will be required.
The successful candidate will report to CfA’s lead technologist, with contextual guidance from ANCIR and CfA’s editors-in-chief, and will work with the CfA’s tech labs in six African countries to build robust systems / infrastructure to support substantial growth over the next three years.
CfA is an advocate for open source software, and the successful candidate would be required to use and create guidelines and best practices as part of any of their work.
Scope of Work:
- Build productive relationships with ANCIR member newsrooms, project partners and institutional stakeholders, to help them identify and tackle their internal digital security challenges.
- Build a dynamic pan-African digital security community for the media and other civic watchdogs, based on peer-learning and peer-support.
- Manage a virtual ‘hotline’ and support service for African newsrooms and/or journalists who need urgent help on digital security and investigative technology issues.
- Develop and deliver a range of technical and non-technical presentations / webinars / classes to help impact digital security skills and investigative technology awareness.
- Manage an onboarding and support service for newsrooms and/or journalists who adopt any ANCIR-endorsed technologies or digital solutions.
- Identify events, organizations, and other approaches to build awareness of ANCIR projects, tools, and technologies and to drive partner activation.
- Develop metrics to measure success in raising awareness and activating partnerships, for progress tracking by the core CfA / ANCIR team and partners.
- Provide ongoing support to regional CfA / ANCIR teams in their own outreach efforts.
- Participate in user engagement and strategic planning / review team meetings and discussions (some of which may be at difficult times due to time zone challenges).
Requirements:
- A passion for helping vulnerable or at-risk users in the media or other civic watchdogs, and making an impact on global challenges.
- An ability to translate complex technical ideas into simple, easy to understand language for non-technical users.
- Amazing verbal and written communication skills, with English as your primary work language (written & spoken), with French and Arabic as optional highly desirable additional languages, alongside major indigenous African languages such as Kiswahili or Hausa.
- A technical understanding of CDNs, DDoS, web caching, DNS and related technologies will be a major advantage.
- Experience with supporting users with web servers, CDNs, and related technologies will be an additional advantage.
- Evidence of experience at successfully building and maintaining a wide array of relationships with both internal colleagues and external partners.
- Demonstrated experience of working effectively as part of a geographically distributed multicultural team will be an advantage.
- A minimum of 4 years work experience, with 2+ years in a similar role.
- An appropriate college / university degree (preferably in a technical field) is preferred though not required.
How to apply
Apply by filling this form – https://goo.gl/forms/QeDga5KWG9b5GhKk2
At CfA, we don’t just accept difference – we celebrate it, we support it, and we thrive on it for the benefit of our employees, our products and our community. CfA is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know.
To all recruitment agencies: CfA tech team does not accept agency resumes. Please do not forward resumes to our jobs alias, CfA employees or any other company location. CfA is not responsible for any fees related to unsolicited resumes.