OpenSanctions careers: remote jobs, culture and where they hire

OpenSanctions builds and maintains an international database of persons and companies of political, criminal or economic interest: sanctioned companies, politicians, fraudsters and criminals, combined from hundreds of public sources into one structured, continuously updated dataset. The data pipeline is open source, public search is free for everyone, and every data point carries provenance back to its source. The database updates from major sanctions authorities within hours of publication and resolves entities across sources, so a person designated by OFAC, the EU and the UN appears as one consolidated profile. Compliance platforms embed it in screening workflows, investigation tools build graph analysis on it, and researchers and journalists use it to track political conflicts and cross-border financial crime.

The project started in 2015 as a free database for journalists investigating financial crime, built by Friedrich Lindenberg alongside his work at the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. A 2021 grant from the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (via the Prototype Fund) funded a rebuild for commercial use, and OpenSanctions Datenbanken GmbH was formally established in Berlin in 2023. The company has operated on revenue since incorporation, has no outside investors, and as of 2026 serves several hundred commercial customers across more than 90 countries, with a team of data engineers, support, commercial and operations staff working across Europe. It holds ISO 27001:2022 certification and operates under a 99.8% uptime SLA.

Friedrich Lindenberg, Founder. Led the data team at the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) from 2016 to 2021, contributing to investigations into transnational crime, offshore finance and money laundering including the Russian and Azerbaijani Laundromat cases. Started the open-source Aleph data platform, used by reporters and analysts in over 40 media organisations, and began OpenSanctions in 2015 as a free persons-of-interest database for journalists before rebuilding it for commercial use with a German federal Prototype Fund grant in 2021.

The mission and the engineering are unusually aligned: openness is the design principle, not a marketing line. The pipeline is open source, the methodology is published, every entity is browsable on the website, and the company says serving journalists and researchers is a deliberate quality mechanism, because investigative reporters have the most exacting requirements for data fidelity. The about page is frank that the work is harder than it sounds: sanctions lists arrive in dozens of formats and languages, names appear in multiple scripts, and thousands of hand-crafted data patches correct what automation misses.

It is also a rare chance to join a profitable, bootstrapped data company rather than a funded startup. Commercial licenses from compliance platforms, fintechs, government agencies and research institutions fund the database, most new customers sign up and start paying without ever talking to a salesperson, and the open Product Engineer role exists to make that self-serve path the best part of the product: billing, the customer account area, business intelligence and internal tooling, owned end to end by one engineer.

OpenSanctions describes itself as a small, mission-focused and friendly team with an async culture and flexible hours: work where and when you are most productive. The company is remote-first with an office in Berlin, and the jobs page says it welcomes people working remotely within plus or minus 3 hours of GMT+1 or joining the Berlin office. The published team page lists around 16 people across leadership, commercial, operations, data engineering and platform engineering, with backgrounds that lean toward journalism and civic tech: alumni of OCCRP, Follow the Money, Laws.Africa, OpenUp and Google among them.

The tone is plainly stated on the about page: the company says it brings transparency and a relative lack of bullshit to the compliance and sanctions world, and its stated ambition is to build a component that is a pleasure to integrate, with standard terms, clear documentation, bulk data you can actually download, and gaps communicated where they exist. Job ads carry a diversity note encouraging applications from people of all ethnicities, ages, gender identities and sexual orientations, even without all the nice-to-haves.

As of October 2026 the jobs page lists two openings: a freelance Product Engineer (remote, CET plus or minus 3 preferred, or Berlin) and a part-time HR Coordinator (50%). The Product Engineer engagement is freelance or contract with an explicitly stated openness to discussing employment later, no agencies, and a long-term working relationship in mind; the role reports into the Head of Engineering and management.

Applications go through an application form only (the posting states that only applications via the form are considered), with a CV, a GitHub or LinkedIn profile if you have one, and short answers to a few questions in place of a cover letter. For the Product Engineer, one question asks you to describe a billing system, internal tool or dashboard you built that a business relied on, and another asks what you would automate first after reading the OpenSanctions pricing page. Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis, and questions can go to jobs@opensanctions.org.