Software Engineer

Software Engineer | Israel West Institute
Remote, London, Prague or Costa Rica | Full-Time or Long-Term Contract | $9,000–$12,000 per month depending on experience
The Israel West Institute (IWI) is looking for a Software Engineer to join our growing international team and help build the technology behind an ambitious new research, policy and media organisation.
This is a role for someone who wants to build, not simply maintain.
IWI currently has a 15-person team and is developing quickly across editorial, research, data, audience and technology.
We focus on understanding Israel's relationships with the United States, Europe and the wider international system, with coverage spanning foreign policy, security, economics, technology, trade, antisemitism, diplomacy and regional affairs.
Explore the Israel West Institute
But we are not trying to build another conventional news website.
Alongside analysis and reporting, we are developing structured research products, trackers, databases, evergreen policy briefings, public-interest tools, topic architectures, data visualisations and new ways for readers to understand complex geopolitical relationships.
Our ambition is aggressive.
Over the next six months, we are working toward building IWI into a publication and research platform reaching 3 million visitors per month.
That means the engineering challenge is not simply building features for the audience we have today.
It is designing the systems we will need if the organisation grows by an order of magnitude.
Where We Are Today
IWI is at an unusually interesting stage.
We are not starting from a PowerPoint deck or an idea.
The organisation is live. Content is being published. Research products are being developed. Audience infrastructure is being built. New formats are being tested and the underlying technical platform is evolving quickly.
At the same time, we are still early enough that many of the systems we ultimately want do not exist yet.
Our current team is 15 people, which means individual engineers can still materially influence how the organisation develops.
We are funded through a combination of:
Donations and supporters
Investment into the organisation and its growth
Advertising and commercial partnerships
This creates a model that allows us to invest in research, editorial work and technical infrastructure while building toward a significantly larger and more sustainable organisation.
For an engineer, that means joining something somewhere between a startup, research institute and digital publication.
There is already an operating organisation around you.
But there is still a huge amount left to build.
What We’re Building
IWI is designed around a simple idea:
A modern policy institute should not only publish articles.
It should build useful information infrastructure.
An article may explain an event today.
A well-designed research product might remain useful for years.
We therefore want IWI to combine:
News and analysis
Long-form policy research
Primary-source documentation
Structured datasets
Interactive research tools
Evergreen institutional briefings
Country and organisation profiles
Historical timelines
Trackers
Topic hubs
Searchable archives
Data visualisations
Research indexes
Public-interest campaigns
Community participation
AI-assisted research tools
Over time, these should increasingly connect to one another rather than existing as isolated pages.
A story about U.S.-Israel security cooperation, for example, might connect automatically to:
Relevant agreements
U.S. institutions
Congressional processes
Previous analysis
Relevant briefings
Defence programmes
Historical timelines
Primary sources
Related policymakers
Trade or economic data
That kind of information architecture is one of the areas where engineering becomes central to what IWI ultimately is.
Products We’ve Already Started Building
We already have several examples of where we want this model to go.
Global Antisemitism Tracker
One of our newest research products is the Global Antisemitism Tracker.
Explore the Global Antisemitism Tracker
Rather than simply publishing individual stories about antisemitic incidents, we are building a maintained research product bringing together national statistics, established monitoring organisations, government information and independent reporting.
The product is designed to distinguish between different datasets and methodologies rather than pretending numbers gathered under different national systems are perfectly comparable.
For engineering, this is the beginning of a much larger opportunity.
We want products like this to become increasingly:
Data-driven
Searchable
Filterable
Visual
Historically comparable
Source-transparent
Automatically maintainable
Connected to related IWI analysis
A static research page can eventually become a genuine research platform.
IWI Briefings
IWI Briefings are our growing evergreen knowledge library.
Instead of being driven purely by the daily news cycle, they explain the institutions, agreements and systems behind Israel's relationships with Western states and the wider region.
Examples include:
The U.S.-Israel Security Assistance Framework
The EU-Israel Association Agreement
The Abraham Accords Explained
The Israel-U.S. Free Trade Agreement
Israel and Europe's Horizon Research Relationship
The Israel-UAE CEPA
The goal is ultimately to build a large structured knowledge library that readers, journalists, researchers and policymakers can use to understand the machinery behind current events.
Engineering will be central to how that library is organised, updated, linked and discovered.
Research Topics
Our Research Topics architecture is another important part of the platform.
Current areas include:
U.S.-Israel relations
Europe-Israel relations
Iran
Gulf states
Regional security
Defence and deterrence
Technology and security
Diplomacy
Political economy
Israel-West relations
Instead of organising thousands of future articles purely chronologically, we want IWI to increasingly structure knowledge around persistent subjects, institutions, relationships and entities.
Public-Interest Petitions
We have also started building a public participation layer through IWI Petitions.
Current campaigns include issues such as:
Transparency around antisemitic abuse on major platforms
Reporting routes for Jewish students experiencing threats or harassment
Access to credible Holocaust education online
These products introduce a very different engineering challenge from publishing.
They require user submissions, databases, consent management, analytics, moderation, campaign infrastructure and ultimately systems capable of handling potentially very large spikes in public participation.
IWI Community
IWI Community is the beginning of the participation layer around our research.
We want researchers, policy professionals, academics, specialists and readers to be able to follow our work, contribute expertise, suggest research questions and engage with projects.
Over time, community functionality could become considerably more sophisticated.
Some of Our Recent Work
IWI's editorial work is intended to combine current developments with deeper institutional analysis.
A few examples:
Israel and Arab states are quietly building a new regional security architecture
An examination of emerging security coordination between Israel, the United States and Arab states, and the distinction between practical military cooperation and formal political alliance.
Read the analysis
The Gulf crisis is rewriting Israel's strategic environment
An analysis of how changes across the Gulf, maritime routes, regional security and Iranian pressure affect Israel's wider strategic environment.
Read the analysis
Israel and Morocco move toward full embassies as the Abraham Accords enter a new phase
A look at how diplomatic normalisation develops through institutions, trade, travel and bilateral agreements rather than announcements alone.
Read the analysis
Europe and Israel search for a working relationship as Gaza recovery moves up the agenda
An examination of the way practical cooperation and major political disagreement can operate simultaneously inside the Europe-Israel relationship.
Read the analysis
The global rise in antisemitism: what the latest evidence shows
A research-led look at incident data, surveys and violent attacks across major Jewish communities, together with the methodological limitations involved in comparing countries.
Read the research
Europe's antisemitism problem is no longer a temporary spike
A deeper examination of whether elevated antisemitism across Europe represents a short-term reaction to individual events or a more persistent change in

Work arrangement
Yes