Head of Product
- Central London, up to £60,000 depending on experience
- Reporting to the Chief Executive, managing the automated factchecking team
- Deadline: Mon 10 June at 10 am, early applications encouraged
Full Fact, the UK’s independent non-partisan factchecking charity, is recruiting a Head of Product for our automated factchecking. You will work closely with our Head of Automated Factchecking, who will be working remotely and part time.
Full Fact’s small team has been pioneering automated factchecking since 2013. After winning funding from Google Digital News Initiative, Omidyar and Facebook, this month Full Fact and our international partners won the Google AI impact challenge. We are one of 20 winners out of 2,600 applications from over 100 countries — Full Fact will be working with Google AI experts for the next three years to dramatically scale factchecking efforts worldwide.
Jobs like this don’t come around often.
You and the Head of Automated Factchecking will jointly lead Full Fact’s work to make factchecking dramatically more effective using technology, to reduce the harm caused by inaccurate and unreliable information. You will responsible for the product and for managing the team.
We aim to give factcheckers and journalists real-time factchecking tools. In the UK, only about 1 in 5 of us generally trust politicians or journalists to tell the truth, and we now live in a world where claims can be made and spread faster and from more directions than ever before. Factchecking must keep up and automation can help.
You need the proven ability to get up to speed in a complex area, show leadership—including ethical leadership—agree direction, and represent the work to stakeholders and publicly.
We are an ambitious team and we have a track record of growth and innovation. We’re looking for someone who can come in and contribute to continuing that record.
Crucially, you need to demonstrate a commitment to doing this for the public benefit. Non-profits experience constraints that for-profit businesses in tech do not and factcheckers operate in a complex political environment which you will need to navigate.
If you are interested in applying but not sure you have all the skills, please do apply. We are open both to supporting learning on the job and to rearranging tasks within the team to suit the skillsets of the best applicant. We are happy to talk flexible working.
See full job description below
What we offer
- Starting salary of up to £60,000 (plus pension) depending on experience.
- 25 days holiday plus bank holidays. We also close the office for a period between Christmas and New Year.
- Comfortable and attractive office by St James Park and Piccadilly with good transport links.
- Employee Assistance Programme.
- Salary sacrifice schemes for education and training.
- Fresh fruit provided in the office.
To apply
Please email the Chief Executive, Will Moy, on jobs@fullfact.org in confidence with a CV and a covering letter.
We prefer to sift applications anonymously. Please use your initials rather than your name and leave identifying details such as email addresses off your CV and covering letter. Please include your contact details in your cover email.
Applications close Mon 10 June at 10am, but we will be inviting applicants to interview on a rolling basis and we may choose to make an early appointment from 3 June onwards.
Head of Product Job Description
You lead the development of technology and tools to make factchecking dramatically more effective and work with colleagues to ensure that they are applied in Full Fact’s daily work.
You promote their use for the public benefit around the world. You ensure that the technology Full Fact builds meets the highest standards of accuracy and fairness and ethics.
With the Head of Automated Factchecking you run the automated factchecking team and are responsible for the quality and effectiveness of its work, for assigning work within the team, and for the wellbeing, management, and development of its members.
As a member of Full Fact’s management team, you have a responsibility for the charity as a whole.
Outcomes
Impact
- Our policy officer is regularly using our automated tools to increase the number of actions we take, and we can measure and improve the proportion of actions that started with the our products
- By September, we are regularly publishing and acting on factchecks that started with automated factchecking, and we can measure the proportion of published factchecks (tweets, posts, etc.) and actions that started with the tools
Capabilities
- We understand how accurate our current claim matching is and have a plan to continually monitor and improve the accuracy, prioritising precision over recall
- By September, we understand how accurate robochecking for statistical claims is and can estimate its potential reach
Product
- By December, develop Full Fact Live and Full Fact Trends into a polished turnkey product based on continuing user research and development
- By December, develop a prototype tool for journalists with a major media organisation
Advocacy and foresight
- Be a known and respected advocate for Full Fact’s principles as they apply to technology responses to misinformation and disinformation
- Maintain an overview of people, organisations, and work in this area and understand the opportunities and priorities for Full Fact
The team you’ll be working with
Our automated factchecking team includes –
- Mevan Babakar, Head of Automated Factchecking
- David Corney, Data Scientist
- Ed Ingold, Technical Lead
- Simon Coltman, Front End Developer
The rest of our management team is made up of the Chief Executive Will Moy, Editor Tom Phillips, Head of Communications (currently recruiting), and Research Manager Amy Sippitt.
What we are looking for from you
Political impartiality,sensitivity, and ethos
- You are committed to the political neutrality of our work and have a good understanding of impartiality (please see the rules on our websitehttps://fullfact.org/about/jobs/)
- Strong understanding of public debate in the UK and sensitivity to the political context we work in
- Strong understanding of how the choices we make in our technology could translate to unintended consequences and unfair bias in the products and capabilities we develop
- Ideally, experience working with public data in an open or public benefit setting
Product and technical leadership
- Experience leading agile tech teams and delivering before
- Own the product vision and roadmap for Trends, Live and future products.
- Understand and articulate the charitable and user value of product features
- Work collaboratively with internal teams and external partners worldwide
- Recognise and develop new products, capabilities and business opportunities
- Ability to find ways through complex problems, sensibly and clearly, whilst understanding and accurately articulating the risks
- Ideally, familiarity with machine learning and artificial intelligence approaches to complex and sensitive problems
- Ability to scrutinise machine learning and artificial intelligence approaches to sensitive problems
Personal qualities
- Strong analytical skills with a keen eye for detail
- Collaborative and participatory approach
- Excellent communication in person and in writing
Management skills and approach
- You can run a team that’s effective and happy
- Focus on delivery not just the big idea
- Commitment to recognising and developing people’s talent
- Ideally, experience working with Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)
- A bonus would be experience of charity management and/or fundraisingOur automated fact checking team in the media