About OpenSanctions
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 by hundreds of commercial clients worldwide for know-your-customer screening, legal compliance, and in-depth investigative analysis.
We are a small, bootstrapped, sustainable business. Transparency and accessibility are core to how we work: our pipeline is open source, and public search is free for everyone. As we grow, our website has to do more work — it's where investigative journalists, compliance teams at global banks, and curious members of the public all form their first impression of us. Our site already runs on a solid technical foundation; what we need is someone to sharpen how it looks and works, and to keep improving it over time.
The role
This is primarily a front-end development role with a strong design sensibility. The website framework is already built — a Next.js / React / TypeScript app — so we're not asking you to start from scratch or re-architect anything. Your job is to mature the visual identity of OpenSanctions incrementally: a steady stream of improvements to our web site that sharpen the user experience and add up to a look that is unmistakably ours.
That means working close to the code and turning ideas into real, responsive, performant pages yourself. You'll take a brief (or spot the problem yourself), propose a direction, and build it. A good eye matters — but the core of the job is being a capable front-end developer who can also make things look right.
We want someone with opinions and the ability to prove them. You should be comfortable pushing back, proposing directions we hadn't asked for, and using data to settle debates. You understand that a website is a commercial and communication tool, not just a canvas — good design here means helping a compliance buyer understand our value in thirty seconds, and helping a journalist trust us in five.
What you'll do
- Build design improvements into the site. Work directly in our front-end to implement changes across the website and marketing surfaces, shipping polished, responsive, performant pages.
- Keep us from looking like everyone else. Resist the gravitational pull toward the generic compliance/SaaS aesthetic. Give OpenSanctions a look that's unmistakably ours: confident, expert, and honest, not another interchangeable data-vendor template.
- Measure what's working. Set up and use web analytics (Google Analytics or similar) to understand how people move through the site, where they drop off, and what converts. Bring that data into your decisions and tell us what the numbers say we should change.
- Work incrementally. Ship small, frequent improvements on a steady cadence — from tweaks to larger builds — rather than one big redesign, and stay with us as the site evolves instead of disappearing after a launch.
- Collaborate with our team. Work closely with our commercial, product, and engineering people, translating rough ideas into shippable front-end work.
About you
Required
- Strong front-end development skills. You're fluent in HTML/CSS and JavaScript/TypeScript, comfortable in a modern React codebase, and you ship working, responsive, performant code — this is the core of the role.
- A genuine design eye and the conviction to use it: you can make a site look distinctive and considered, and you know how to keep it from drifting into the generic template everyone else in this space uses.
- A portfolio of web work you built yourself, ideally including B2B, SaaS, data, or product-led sites — with examples where you shaped both how it looks and how it's built.
- Comfort with web analytics: setting up and reading Google Analytics (or equivalent) and turning traffic data into concrete decisions.
- Self-directed and reliable as a freelancer: you manage your own time, communicate clearly, and can be counted on for ongoing updates.
- Fluent to native English (written and spoken), able to overlap working hours with CET (preferably CET ±3).
Nice to have
- Familiarity with our stack (Next.js, React, TypeScript, SCSS/Bootstrap) so you can move fast in the codebase from day one.
- A commercial and product instinct — a feel for how design and build choices affect how people buy, trust, and use a service.
- A point of view on copy and messaging: you can improve wording, structure a page's narrative, and tell us when the text is burying the point.
- Brand and identity work beyond the website — decks, social, print, illustration.
- Interest in open data, compliance, journalism, or the wider public-interest space we work in.
- Experience working with small, technical teams.
Details
- Engagement: Freelance / contract, ongoing. We're looking for a long-term relationship rather than a single project.
- Workload: Flexible and variable — heavier during builds and campaigns, lighter in between. Let's discuss what works for both of us.
- Rates: Tell us how you like to work (day rate, retainer, per-project) and we'll find a fair arrangement.
- Remote-first, work where and when you're most productive. We'll consider partners within roughly three time zones of Europe.
- Small, friendly team, no "hyper-growth" burnout vibes.
How to apply
Please note: we're looking to work with an individual freelancer, not an agency or company. No companies need apply, please.
Email jobs@opensanctions.org with a short note on how you like to work, your portfolio, and — if you have them — links to sites you built. Pointing at a site (ours included) and telling us what you'd change, and how you'd implement it, is very welcome.
We look forward to meeting you!
We value diversity of all kinds in our team, and encourage applications from people of all ethnicities, ages, gender identities, and sexual orientations. Even if you feel like you don't have all the 'nice-to-haves', please do apply.
