Editorial Director, Newsroom Engineering

POLITICO • Arlington, VA

5d

About The Position

We’re at an inflection point: AI is reshaping how audiences find, consume, and interact with news. POLITICO’s advantage remains our original reporting, our judgment, and our distinct voice. But to protect and extend that advantage we need the newsroom at the center of innovation — moving faster, experimenting more boldly, and turning pilots into reliable infrastructure rather than one-off demos. We want to invest in a newsroom team so that we can move from quarterly experiments to shipping AI features every couple of weeks, and building POLITICO-specific models that competitors can’t replicate. We also want to invest knowledge and technical thinking in our newsroom to more closely connect our journalism with our innovative product building. POLITICO is seeking an editorial-minded technical leader to lead this team and serve as our Editorial Director, Newsroom Engineering. This role will be a player-coach who turns newsroom priorities into tools, workflows, and platforms that help our reporters and editors move faster without sacrificing accuracy or voice. You’ll run team’s agile rituals; personally review high-risk pull requests; evaluate outcomes; and contribute code. In 2026, the team’s mandate is to help every desk leverage AI and other new technologies in practical, novel ways. Adoption and impact are the bar for success with KPIs measured by minutes saved, time-to-publish, quality preserved, and active usage. You’ll also be responsible for translating editorial priorities into a living roadmap. You’ll identify use cases and opportunities for workflow improvements by staying connected to newsroom priorities and fostering relationships with editors and reporters Who You Are: A successful Editorial Director at POLITICO exhibits empathy, a collaborative spirit, and tenacity to solve root causes — not just symptoms. If you align with our mission of empowering newsrooms through technology and believe you can increase our impact, please apply. We’re excited to meet you!

Requirements

• Proven experience with modern front-end frameworks (Typescript/React/Vue) and back-end stacks (Node/Python)
• Fluency as a technical leader planning/designing software with a team of engineers as well as providing a solid foundation of feedback through code review, modern QA methodology, and individual goal setting
• Experience deploying event-driven microservices across serverless platforms (AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions/Cloud Run, Azure Functions) using Infrastructure-as-Code paradigms (Terraform/CloudFormation)
• Track record leveraging novel technologies (like AI) to solve real problems for reporters and editors
• Strong written and spoken communication with an ability to translate editorial standards and audience goals into product and engineering requirements

Nice To Haves

• Experience with advanced data structures (taxonomies, vector databases, knowledge graphs) and Agile or modified-Agile environments is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Communicate a clear vision for creating and implementing AI-powered newsroom tools that practically meet journalist’s needs – pushing the boundaries on what’s possible with our original reporting and unique voice while maintaining editorial standards
• Provide a nurturing, team-oriented environment by fostering continuous learning, experimentation, and skill development for a team of full-stack developers and engineers
• Collaborate with cross-company product leaders, audience experts, and newsrooms in both the US and EU to prioritize high-impact work
• Own agile rituals for task intake, backlog triage, sprint planning, stand-ups, demos, retros, and a visible release calendar
• Set engineering standards for various coding teams across our newsroom, and personally review high-stakes PRs across multiple teams to protect reliability, performance, and editorial quality
• Monitor engineering capacity and skills, manage hiring and onboarding, and collaborate on staffing to maximize business value

What This Job Offers

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