AI Newsroom Developer

Hearst • Houston, TX

9d • Hybrid

About The Position

The Houston Chronicle is seeking an AI Newsroom Developer to own the hands-on integration of AI into new content products, newsroom tools and workflows. The successful candidate will work closely with reporters and editors across the newsroom to identify high-impact opportunities to make our journalism more personal, efficient and accessible, while working to uphold our high newsroom standards regarding the use of AI. The role will entail building, testing, and maintaining AI pipelines; ensuring accuracy and transparency in AI-assisted content; training colleagues on tools; and working with LLMs to improve our journalism. The position combines technical know-how with journalistic judgment to help the newsroom innovate responsibly at scale. The successful candidate will be comfortable coming up with their own ideas and identifying the best ideas from around the newsroom and the company. They will understand that the best local journalism is the product of human collaboration while also educating others about the benefits of generative AI. This person will report to the Senior Director of Innovation & Experimentation and will be expected to be the center of collaboration with the rest of the newsroom.

Requirements

• Demonstrated experience with large language models and automatic speech recognition models, as well as expertise in prompt engineering.
• Demonstrated experience building agentic systems that go beyond a simple chat interface.
• Familiarity with newsroom AI applications for transcription, summarization and translation.
• Technical literacy: ability to work with APIs, structured data, or scripting languages (Python, JavaScript).
• Excellent communication and training skills; able to translate technical concepts for nontechnical colleagues.
• Ability to self-manage and prioritize multiple projects simultaneously, meeting tight deadlines without compromising on quality.
• Commitment to ethical journalism, transparency, and accuracy.

Responsibilities

• Leverage AI in the building of utility products for consumers.
• Build, evaluate, pilot and integrate generative AI and automation tools, including skills and agents, into the newsroom.
• Lead training sessions and provide support for editors and reporters using AI tools.
• Identify opportunities where AI can augment journalism (e.g., enhanced data collection, transcription, summarization, civic coverage, audience personalization).
• Engineer reliable prompts and system instructions; evaluate and fine tune outputs for accuracy, fairness, and clarity.
• Collaborate with product and engineering teams on internal tools to improve efficiency and enhance storytelling.
• Ensure AI applications align with ethical journalism standards and company AI policies.
• Establish guardrails for accuracy, sourcing, transparency, and human oversight of AI-assisted content.
• Audit and monitor newsroom AI use, providing regular updates to editorial leadership.
• Serve as a point person for AI use across the newsroom.
• Partner with editorial leads to identify reporting beats where AI-assisted workflows can expand coverage (e.g. civic meeting monitoring, local guides, data-heavy investigations).

Benefits

• Advertisers are partnering with us to help them navigate new marketing strategies in today’s increasingly complex digital environment.
• We leverage our substantial audience reach, coupled with best in class advertising solutions to keep our customer’s brand in front of the right people at the right time.
• Our company is diverse and filled with smart, passionate people who want to make a difference in their community, regardless of the role they play in the company.
• We offer an upbeat and collaborative working environment and expect our people to challenge the norm.
• At HNP, we are investing in new and innovative ways to tell stories – growing newsrooms, diversifying tools, evolving platforms – to support the millions of people who trust us each month to help them make decisions, take action and be inspired.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed