Staff Software Engineer, AI Platforms

The mission of The New York Times is to seek the truth and help people understand the world. That means independent journalism is at the heart of all we do as a company. It's why we have a world-renowned newsroom that sends journalists to report on the ground from nearly 160 countries. It's why we focus deeply on how our readers will experience our journalism, from print to audio to a world-class digital and app destination. And it's why our business strategy centers on making journalism so good that it's worth paying for. 

About the Role

The New AI Products and Platforms mission is a central hub for new, high-ambition AI opportunities and services at The Times. We are hiring a Staff Engineer to lead the technical vision and architecture of our internal AI Platform. This platform will enable teams across the company to build, deploy, and manage applications that use large language models (LLMs) to advance our journalism and our business. You will report to the Director of AI Platforms and work with a team of engineers, designers, product and project managers, data scientists, and newsroom stakeholders to make investments in AI possible across The Times.

This is a hybrid position based in our New York City headquarters. You can typically expect to come into the office two days per week.

Responsibilities:

• Define and drive the long-term technical vision and architecture for the AI Platform.
• Lead the design and implementation of highly scalable, reliable, and performant backend services and APIs.
• Make critical technical decisions that will have a lasting impact on the platform and the engineering organization.
• Mentor and grow other engineers on the team, fostering a culture of engineering excellence.
• Collaborate with other senior technical leaders across the organization to ensure the AI Platform aligns with broader company-wide technical strategy.
• Stay at the forefront of the rapidly evolving AI and LLM landscape, identifying and advocating for the adoption of new technologies and best practices.
• Tackle the most complex and ambiguous technical challenges on the team.
• Ensure a high degree of code quality, security, and system observability.
• Demonstrate support and understanding of our value of journalistic independence and a strong commitment to our mission to seek the truth and help people understand the world.

Basic Qualifications:

• 7+ years of software engineering experience, with a proven track record of technical leadership.
• 7+ years of experience in one or more backend programming languages such as Python or Go.
• 7+ years of experience designing, building, and operating complex, large-scale distributed systems and APIs.
• 5+ years of experience database technologies, including both SQL and NoSQL databases.
• 2+ years of experience building applications with Large Language Models (LLMs) and a deep understanding of the surrounding ecosystem (e.g., orchestration, retrieval-augmented generation).

Preferred Qualifications:

• Extensive experience with MLOps, including building systems for model and prompt evaluation, tracing, and monitoring.
• Deep familiarity with containerization and orchestration technologies like Docker and Kubernetes.
• Extensive experience with infrastructure as code (e.g., Terraform, CloudFormation).
• Deep experience with cloud computing platforms like GCP or AWS and their associated services (e.g., Cloud Functions, S3, RDS).
• A nuanced understanding of the trade-offs and complexities of LLM orchestration and agentic frameworks.

#LI-Hybrid

REQ-018989

The annual base pay range for this role is between:

$162,000 - $175,000 USD

The New York Times Company is committed to being the world's best source of independent, reliable and quality journalism. To do so, we embrace a diverse workforce that has a broad range of backgrounds and experiences across our ranks, at all levels of the organization. We encourage people from all  backgrounds to apply.

We are  an Equal Opportunity Employer and do not discriminate on the basis of an individual's sex, age, race, color, creed, national origin, alienage, religion, marital status, pregnancy, sexual orientation or affectional preference, gender identity and expression, disability, genetic trait or predisposition, carrier status, citizenship, veteran or military status and other personal characteristics protected by law. All applications will receive consideration for employment without regard to legally protected characteristics.  The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC)'s Know Your Rights Poster is available here. 

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