Chief AI Officer

The Washington Post•Washington, DC

1d•$281,850 - $469,750•Onsite

About The Position

The Washington Post is looking for a Chief AI Officer, reporting to the CTO, to set and drive the AI strategy for the entire company. This is a rare mandate. It spans the newsroom, engineering, advertising, and subscriptions, and it treats AI not as a cost-cutting tool but as a way to build the products that will define the next era of news. The Chief AI Officer will unify these efforts under one strategy, raise the technical bar across all of them, and decide where we go next. This person owns the AI roadmap for the company and builds it in genuine partnership with the leaders who run each business. They translate dense technical possibility into value the business can measure, and they hold the line on the thing that matters most to a news organization: the truth. Products that ship under this leader are accurate, grounded, and trustworthy. A reader-facing feature that hallucinates is not a shipping candidate.

Requirements

A strong track record of shipping AI products that reached real users and worked, with accuracy and reliability you can speak to concretely. Public-facing products that did not hallucinate their way into retractions.
Deep, hands-on generative AI experience. You understand how modern language models, retrieval systems, fine-tuning, and evaluation actually work, and you can engage with the technical detail rather than manage from a distance.
The ability to read dense technical requirements and research and translate them into product and business value.
Experience building AI capability in-house, not only assembling vendor tools. You know when each approach is right.
Executive-level judgment and the ability to lead through influence across editorial, engineering, and commercial teams with very different cultures and incentives.
A genuine commitment to accuracy and truth, and the instinct to treat a factual error as unacceptable rather than as an acceptable model limitation.
Strong communication skills, including the ability to explain hard technical tradeoffs to non-technical leaders and to earn the trust of a skeptical newsroom.
Experience in media, publishing, or another domain where trust and accuracy are the core of the product.
A background that spans research and applied product work.
Experience standing up AI governance and evaluation practices from scratch.

Responsibilities

Own the company-wide AI strategy and roadmap. Define where AI creates the most value across journalism, engineering, advertising, and subscriptions, sequence the work, and hold the roadmap accountable to real outcomes alongside the business leaders who own each area.
Ship reader-facing products, not just internal efficiency. Lead the design and delivery of AI products that readers, advertisers, and subscribers touch directly, creating new products that grow the business and expand what journalism can do.
Build, do not just buy. Define the company's approach to leveraging third-party foundation models, fine-tuning, retrieval infrastructure, and proprietary capabilities while making deliberate decisions across cost, control, latency, data rights, and defensibility.
Guarantee accuracy and eliminate hallucination in what we ship. Establish the evaluation frameworks, retrieval grounding, human review, and guardrails that make AI products dependable, define a clear standard for what is publishable, and uphold accountability for the accuracy and trustworthiness of everything we ship.
Partner across the whole company. Work directly with newsroom leadership, product, engineering, commercial, subscription, standards, and legal teams to earn the trust of the newsroom while delivering AI tools that create measurable value and help commercial teams move revenue.
Parse dense technical requirements into business value. Move fluently between model architecture discussions and P&L conversations, separating meaningful technical advances from hype and translating emerging AI capabilities into measurable business value.
Set the standards, governance, and red lines. Define responsible AI governance, data rights, bias mitigation, risk management, and organizational standards in partnership with newsroom and standards leaders.
Build the team and the culture. Recruit, develop, and lead world-class AI talent while fostering AI fluency and responsible AI adoption throughout the organization.
Establish a unified AI roadmap and evaluation practice that the company trusts, balancing build-versus-buy decisions while delivering reader-facing and commercial AI products that meet The Washington Post's standards for quality, accuracy, and long-term business impact.