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OpenSanctions | Product Engineer | Berlin, Germany / REMOTE (CET ±3 preferred) | Freelance / employment

OpenSanctions is a small, bootstrapped company building an open source database of sanctioned people and companies, politicians, and other entities of public interest. Journalists use it for investigations; hundreds of businesses use it for compliance screening.

I'm looking for a product engineer to own the systems around our commercial product: customer signup and lifecycle management, billing, reporting and analytics, and tools for our support team. You'd work across Python, SQL, and React/Next.js. You'll be empowered to decide what to build, working with the people who use these systems. We hope to ship improvements continuously and see what works quickly.

We're remote first, with a desk in Berlin if you want one. This is a freelance role with an option to go for employment. We're reviewing applications on a rolling basis. Not considering agencies.

Details: https://www.opensanctions.org/docs/company/jobs/2026-09-prod...

Please apply through the form linked in the job description - no cover letter, just share some basic facts please :)

Ukraine is not part of NATO. Should they wish to do so, they are a sovereign state and should be free to apply, entirely irrespective of the feelings of anyone in Moscow.

Until the day of their full admission to NATO, they cannot be held liable, punished or even criticized for any of the actions of NATO. Specifically, starting a full illegal invasion against them has nothing to do with NATO.

OpenSanctions | Data Platform Engineer | Full-time | REMOTE (EU) / HYBRID Berlin | https://opensanctions.org

We help to keep people and companies accountable for their political and economic actions. OpenSanctions builds an open source database that tracks a wide range of entities in the public interest: sanctioned companies, politicians, fraudsters and criminals. Originally built to support anti-corruption journalists, OpenSanctions has also become a powerful tool used for customer screening, legal compliance and in-depth investigative analysis.

We’re hiring a mid-career or senior engineer who will assume co-ownership of our data infrastructure. Our value proposition is to produce reliable, high-quality data, so you should share that passion and take pride in making an excellent, open source technology product.

Read more: https://www.opensanctions.org/docs/company/jobs/2024-09-data...

Contact me: jobs@opensanctions.org

OpenSanctions | Data engineer | Full-time | Remote CET +/- 3hrs or Onsite Berlin, Germany

OpenSanctions helps to keep people and companies accountable for their political and economic actions. We build a database that tracks sanctioned companies, politicians, fraudsters and criminals. Originally built to support anti-corruption journalists, OpenSanctions has also become a powerful tool used for sanctions screening, legal compliance and in-depth investigative analysis.

We're looking for a third engineer to help us add more data sources, work with our customers to integrate our data into their solutions, and improve our open source data processing framework. Python stack, simple but solid tech.

Read more: https://www.opensanctions.org/docs/company/jobs/2023-12-data...

EDIT: THANK YOU to everyone who emailed. It's an amazing candidate pool to review, so declaring this closed for now.

I think the days when you could just set up a company in some random country and run it from Germany are pretty over, the Finanzamt will just treat it as a domestic entity unless you can prove you've gone full nomad.

I worry that Lukas is about to find out about the business end of the Umwandlungssteuergesetz: converting a Einzelunternehmen to a GmbH is a surprising amount of faff, and once you've done it you (normally) end up with a company you can't easily sell for 7 years without paying some pretty hard-core taxes. I got to do this whole dance early this year, and it took a big bite of momentum out of the little bootstrap I was trying to pull.

As weird as it sounds: German founders, consider just biting the bullet and doing a GmbH straight away. Conversion is no fun. And even worse, UGs are hated by everyone with a law degree for absolutely no reason, but they will try to make your life as difficult as they can just to show who is boss.

Unfortunately, the "Rapid Application Development" thing also seems to apply to the library itself: you get a new release every other week, and stuff breaks in somewhat unpredictable places. So it's easy to prototype something with Textual, but hard to maintain it afterwards.

hello sir :-P

OpenSanctions | https://opensanctions.org | Data / Integration Engineer | REMOTE (Europe, Berlin) | Full-time

OpenSanctions helps to keep people and companies accountable for their political and economic actions. We build a database that tracks a wide range of entities in the public interest: sanctioned companies, politicians, fraudsters and criminals. Originally built to support anti-corruption journalists, OpenSanctions has also become a powerful tool used for customer screening, legal compliance and in-depth investigative analysis.

We take pride in providing a high quality dataset to the public and to our subscribers. Based on an open source data pipeline and providing public search for everybody, we bring transparency and a (relative) lack of bullshit to the compliance/sanctions world.

You will build and maintain a data pipeline that consolidates information from public sources into a high-quality dataset; improve our techniques for record linkage, tracking changes and data lineage; think up and implement advanced data quality assurance mechanisms and build additional crawlers for relevant data sources.

You will work with customers to help them adopt our product for their use cases and answer technical questions about the product.

Job ad: https://www.opensanctions.org/docs/jobs/2023-03-data-enginee... Apply: jobs@opensanctions.org

After reading this I’m fully confused by how they define dark matter. Stuff that doesn’t come from the distro package manager? Everything installed via other mechanisms? Assets copied into the container as part of the build mechanism?

Wouldn’t it make more sense to define dark matter as all the stuff that is installed in a container but never activated (unless exploited?)

When you say "might" - you're aware Tornado was actually used for these things to the tune of at least half a billion dollars?

Basically, the case you're making is: they might have actively aided and abetted nuclear proliferation - but they're technologists, so their actions are sacrosanct and cannot be subject to the usual penalities because we've been ultra smart and managed to create an industry where free speech and money laundering can be switched out at will like in a shell game.

> Sending a transaction is an act of publishing information, so this means publishing certain information is illegal for Americans.

Try sending money to Al Qaeda and you'll find out this not exactly a new thing.

The argument you're making is that the laws made by a democratic government should not apply to a part of the world, because it uses fancy language like "smart contract". That's an extraordinary claim.

The idea that "no-one runs" them is also bogus: every Ethereum node runs them. Having a public-access virtual machine becomes a weird legal matter once the North Koreans start using that for proliferation.

It is law enforcement working as intended. Freedom is complicated, I guess.

Judging from your tone I suspect you'll love this fun fact: amongst other things, this sort of sanctions regime stems from the PATRIOT Act. Beacon of liberty that thing.

If you were to send money through tornado from now on, and this was discovered and linked to your identity, you would face a criminal liability in the US.

Yes.

Exactly this is happening here, and not in a rhetorical way. And the US government have, you know, guns.

Curious to see how the crypto world will respond. They'll probably take a minute to realise that being sanctioned is unlike being indicted: if someone is indicted, they have a problem but you can technically keep doing business with them.

If an entity is sanctioned, anyone doing business with them (such as handling BTC downstream from Tornado) will face a criminal liability. You will have a problem, and a nasty one.

That thing just turned into a hand grenade.

Interesting point! I wonder if https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P8554 would be a good model for this? Perhaps this is also a bit different between countries - in some, I think the government has to resign while in others the term change is sort of constitutional-automatic...

Source? To what extent has this been quantified? Of course there's some anecdotes that someone puts a couple of solar panels on a mining cluster, but for all the numbers I've seen around this, it's lipstick on a pig. The climate balance of the thing is horrific.

That sounds a lot like, you know, web 2.0. Let's scheme this out: Facebook (and its corporate policies) is often named a motivating factor for web3. If I wanted to make a web3 replacement (let's call it MastoCoin), how would the economics of that actually work? People would still want to upload lots of posts and pictures and stuff, and that would presumably continue to live on S3 (etc.). Somebody needs to pay the bills for that monthly. So even if I had to pay $3 bucks in gas to post my sarcastic tweet, someone else would incur an indefinite expenditure on it, no? I really cannot think of a non-pyramid model here.

You mean the thing when the ETH people are going to hand the power over the people with the most money? I'm sure this idea is deeply chilling to... venture capitalists, they're probably shaking in their boots.

> Put differently: it turned out that permissionless publishing alone was insufficient. We also need permissionless data.

Has the author ever heard of OpenStreetMap, Wikipedia, or a million other projects like them? I'm also not quite sure "permissionless data" is how I'd describe a database that stores tiny amounts of data at a massive cost. Pay-to-play is permissionless iif you have the money.

Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease.

Towards the end, the author claims that the benefit of crypto will be to teach people financial literacy. Not only is that a little bit like teaching people responsible drinking by bringing them to the Oktoberfest, I'm also not sure all the people who do not have bank accounts are really going to use their late-model iPads to watch CryptoBroTube to learn about stablecoins and NFTs...

Nominating this post for the "hand-waving argument of the year" awards.

I can't wait for this to accidentally become a vector for an RCE... :)

I really feel what you're saying. It's deeply aggravating. I feel a lot of it is due to the high level of wealth and overall satisfaction that much of German society has experienced for the past few decades (inb4: I know there's poverty here). It's a very weird form of decadence, based on the principle that "this worked well so far".

My coping strategy is to remind myself that it's probably the linked flip side of many of the things that I appreciate - good labour and consumer protection, good healthcare, public transport, a not-totally-fucked income distribution.

But: yeeeaaaah.

I'm curious how well this will fare in a German context, as opposed to the US, where 538 now seems a solid part of the campaign season.

Some differences come to mind: voter participation in DE is higher and campaign cost is much lower, meaning it is perhaps a bit less about activating your supporters and more about actually getting people to change their preferences.

Volatility seems really high, too - see the recent rise and fall of the Greens. There's also a few weird turning points, like the 5% quorum that could conceivably hit the Left this season. And there's the non-fixed number of seats.

So: congrats, INWT, for the nice marketing. Let's see if you picked a good model :)

The latency issue with ES probably comes from how we use the indexes: each type of entity (documents, emails, people, companies) ends up with its own index. 48 in total at the moment. This of course introduces lots of overhead at the beginning, but with a larger dataset and with a clustered ES it pays off at scale. We should consider re-adding single index operation mode for small deployment.

OCCRP | www.occrp.org | ONSITE (Sarajevo, Bosnia) or PARTIALLY REMOTE | Full-time

The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) is an award-winning network of investigative reporters in countries across the world. In the last few years, we’ve published the Panama Papers, the Paradise Papers, the Troika, Azerbaijani, and Russian Laundromats, and many other large, collaborative, investigative projects.

We are looking for a Head of Web to move our primary website and related project sites to a new generation of digital and visual storytelling. You will build an in-house digital team and draw on external skills as needed. You will work closely with our editorial, data and tech teams. You will lead on managing the look and feel of OCCRP and handling migrating the back end of occrp.org towards an improved content management system.

https://www.occrp.org/en/occrp-jobs/head-of-web

I follow this a bit in the news industry: it's a business that's been deeply changed by the internet and there are no easy answers for how to fund good news reporting in the future.

Yet media executives have demonstrated an unlikely talent in not just missing out on opportunities to make working online platforms and re-claiming some ad revenue from social media companies. Instead, they've been jumping onto any technical innovation (VR, video embeds, blockchain, ...) with not the slightest bit of strategy, just hoping to get some disruption fairy dust on them that might magically save them.

So, instead of working on business models, you can regularly see media executives at conferences with Oculus Rift on their head and wildly flailing arms. Beautiful metaphor, if you ask me...

So to be clear: "Kleptocrats gonna klepto" is the deep "understanding of the mechanisms of finance" and the cure to "lazy propaganda" that you advertise for?

Beyond that, thanks for going full ad hominem.

You're mixing a few things up here. The set of countries that are affected by the resource curse, and those dealing in financial secrecy (what else would you call it?), are disjoint.

The phenomena are linked through money laundering: wealth generated from state capture in one country does not want to stay in the politically and economically unstable environment it has helped create. It therefore needs to be channeled into the western financial system, the UK or Europe. That's done using shell companies in the BVI, CY, SY, LUX, MT, CH, KN etc. This way financial secrecy creates impunity, where the wealth taken from developing countries evades domestic accountability.

Examples: the Aliyevs, Dos Santos, Karimova, Yanukovych, Roldugin, the cabinet of Goodluck Jonathan, and even the Guptas.

It's also a bit weird to describe this as in issue of BVI sovereignty. The BVI government is run by a governor appointed by the British queen on advice from the British government. It basically duck types as a colony. The same is even more true for IOM, GG, JE. If only there were some explanation for why it benefits the UK to have half a dozen financial secrecy jurisdictions in its sphere of influence. The system is clearly all about sovereignty.

Finally, I did not say that discussing spending was beneath discourse -- merely arguing that governments doing taxation was pretty much what makes them governments. Otherwise it's a golf club.

I'll remain eternally grateful for any further explanations of the mechanisms of finance and their benevolence you may have to offer.