FT seeks a US data journalist

The FT’s visual and data journalism team is looking for an experienced data journalist to cover US national news, including the 2026 midterm elections. This role is offered on a fixed-term basis through to December 31 2026.

The successful applicant will collaborate with US-based news editors and correspondents across North America as well as colleagues in London, Hong Kong and beyond. You’ll help us deliver compelling journalism on US electoral politics, campaign finance and public policy, and how these topics intersect with our core coverage areas of global trade, international relations, economics and financial markets.

Able to work self-sufficiently, you’ll also collaborate with others in the wider Visual & Data Journalism team, as well as reporters and editors from across the FT’s network who need support applying data-driven methods to their work.

We are happy to consider candidates currently eligible to work in the US and wishing to be based in either Washington DC or New York City.

Occasional weekend/flexible working may be required as part of covering fast-moving news.

Essential skills

You will have a strong portfolio of work in data journalism, ideally focused on business, finance, economics or politics in North America. In addition, you will have:

• Experience using data journalism or data science techniques to find and tell news stories
• Confidence using R or Python for data sourcing (including web scraping, APIs and large databases), cleaning and analysis
• Excellent communication skills, particularly the ability to explain your quantitative analysis work simply to non-specialist audience
• A passion for continuously learning in order to keep your skills at the forefront of current practice

Desirable skills

While this is not a graphics-production role, experience of using data visualisation effectively in reporting would be a distinct advantage.

In addition, while we don’t expect you to have all of these skills, any of the following would be beneficial, so please mention them in your cover letter and résumé:

• Experience covering quantitative aspects of US political polling, electoral politics, campaign finance or public policy analysis
• Training in statistics, data science or quantitative social science methods
• Experience building, maintaining or working with pipelines for continuously acquiring and processing data
• Maintaining statistical models
• Experience applying data analysis in economic, business or financial journalism
• Use of machine learning or large language models in a journalism context
• Training and supporting others in data-handling techniques
• Knowledge of working collaboratively with others on coding projects using version control systems such as Git
• Data analysis work related to political polling and elections, international trade, warfare or uncovering corporate wrongdoing
• Collaborating with data providers, subject specialists, journalists, designers and developers to deliver data-driven stories and data visualisations for a non-specialist audience
• Familiarity with the Flourish data visualisation tool

Please submit your application by the end of the day, Sunday May 10 2026. 

To apply, go here.