Data Engineering Internship - Spring 2024

Intern Testimonials

"My internship experience at Ballotpedia was nothing short of exceptional. Working alongside a team of passionate and talented individuals, I felt like an integral part of the organization from day one. The collaborative atmosphere and the focus on personal development allowed me to learn and grow as a data engineer. I was impressed by the commitment to transparency and the meaningful impact Ballotpedia makes in promoting civic engagement. The experience not only enriched my technical skills but also instilled in me a deeper appreciation for the democratic process. I am grateful for the opportunities provided and would wholeheartedly recommend Ballotpedia as an outstanding place to work and contribute to a vital cause." - Abhishek Verma, Fall 2023 Data Engineering Intern

“Ballotpedia is an excellent place to work. You will be encouraged to grow and learn, and be given the freedom to explore new territories.” - Noah Pedroso, Spring 2023 Data Engineering Intern

"Working as a tech intern at Ballotpedia is one of the highlights of my year. It’s challenging, but I’ve been afforded the opportunity to work with some of the most professional and courteous staff members I’ve ever met. It's an excellent opportunity to learn about database structure and management, web design and even digital map drawing. The experience to be gained from working at Ballotpedia is invaluable for a multitude of careers ranging from IT and software development to database administration." — Eric Huang, 2019 Fall/2020 Spring/Summer 2020 Intern

Description:

Ballotpedia’s Data Engineering internship program offers internship candidates the opportunity to work within one of two tracks – interning directly with our Tech department staff or interning as an embedded member of the Editorial department, helping to solve creative problems while collaborating with Tech department staff.

Tech Department Track

As a Ballotpedia Data Engineering Intern in the Tech Track, you will work with the Tech team to develop automated ETL workflows to process data used for local election coverage. We will be looking at official election data sources and developing reusable processes to acquire this data, convert it to a standard format, and import it into our database. This will help Ballotpedia’s coverage scale to more municipalities in order to better educate voters.

This will involve:

• Creating and modifying Python scripts
• Working with spreadsheets and databases
• Scraping candidate data from official sources
• Developing processes to convert data into a standard format
• Running processes to ingest data into a database
• Testing, QA, and manual review
• Conducting online research and some manual data entry

Editorial Department Track

As a Ballotpedia Data Engineering Intern in the Editorial Track, you will work closely with the Editorial Department to support the publication of content for Ballotpedia’s millions of readers. This includes working with data, spreadsheets, and analysis material to support the creation of unique content.

This will involve:

• Conduct unique analysis
• Work closely with Marquee team members to support publishing analysis articles on Ballotpedia.
• Working with spreadsheets and databases
• Develop data quality improvements to Ballotpedia’s legislative tracking articles
• Calculate and visualize data related to 2023 election results
• Create and prepare infrastructure for 2024 elections analysis

In both tracks you will learn about elections administration, web scraping, and working with data, while surrounded by a small, enthusiastic, and open-minded team. Aspiring data scientists, researchers with a programming bent, or back-end software engineers might find this particularly interesting.

Some Python and SQL experience is required. Familiarity with some of the following is preferred, though not required: Google Colab or Jupyter Notebooks, Beautiful Soup, Scrapy, Google Sheets or Excel.

Ballotpedia’s Spring 2024 internship runs from Monday, January 8, 2024 to Friday, May 3, 2024. Ballotpedia’s spring internship is a part-time internship program; interns will work approximately 10-20 hours per week depending on their availability.

Ballotpedia is happy to facilitate credit for your internship experience if that is available to you. If you will be seeking credit for your internship, and if there is anything that Ballotpedia will need to do to assist you, please include that information in the same file as your cover letter.

Environment

Ballotpedia interns will work remotely, as all Ballotpedia staff work remotely. To join Ballotpedia, you must have a well-functioning computer with Internet access. Ballotpedia uses Google Applications (Gmail, Google Calendar, Drive and more) to accomplish our goals. Some familiarity with Google Applications is helpful.

Compensation

Interns will be compensated at $20.00 per hour.

Please note: If the minimum wage in your area is more than $20.00 per hour, you will be compensated in accordance with your area’s minimum wage.

To Apply

Please attach the following in PDF format:

• résumé
• cover letter which states your interest in the Data Engineering internship, desired track (Tech or Editorial) and a statement of what you hope to learn from this internship
• Optional: GitHub repository link and/or other examples of projects you’ve worked on that demonstrate your competencies

Please ensure that either your resume or your cover letter include your current address. Applications that do not include a current address will not be accepted.

About Ballotpedia

Ballotpedia is a collaborative team of fast learners and creative problem solvers who are eager to work hard to make the world a better place. We believe the world will be a better place if every citizen has access to information to make informed decisions about their vote in every election in which they are eligible to vote: primary, general, and special elections; federal, state, and local offices.

We work diligently to present the available information about elections, candidates, judges, ballot measures, policies, and more in a way that enables our readers to vote with confidence and to act as engaged citizens outside of the polling booth.

Ballotpedia readers, like Ballotpedia staff, are special people.

When we launched in 2007, we did not go out of our way to seek new readers. Starting with our small team of visionary idealists, nerds, and aspiring political journalists, we just wrote the best unbiased online articles we could, especially about ballot measures. Readers found those articles in droves. It turns out there was an unclaimed audience out there—people who wanted straightforward facts about political issues, and were willing to read at length instead of just scanning the headlines.

“If you build it, they will come:'' our readers came to our neutral oasis in growing numbers; we’ve had many millions of lifetime pageviews, we reached nearly half of all voters in 2020, and, in the month surrounding the November 2020 election, we were the 77th most-visited website in the U.S.

We’ve come to realize that we need to meet our readers where they are. In doing so, over the past five years, we’ve grown our email newsletter program from infancy to include more than 2,000,000 opt-in subscribers with more than a dozen newsletters to choose from. We are working in numerous ways to help put our neutral information in front of people at the times when they most need it, including on mobile phones while you’re standing in the voting booth. We firmly believe that our readers, and the mindset we help them cultivate, are essential in a world where too many others are fighting to get us all addicted to sensational posts and the irrational decisions they foster.

If this is a mission you’d be willing to work hard to achieve, and if this is a team you’d be willing to work hard with—JOIN US.

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