Newsroom AI and Automation Engineer

Hearst Communications•New York, NY

27d•$95,000 - $100,000•Onsite

About The Position

Hearst Television (HTV) is hiring a Newsroom AI and Automation Engineer. The ideal candidate will have a journalism/newsroom background and be passionate about Generative AI technology. You'll help develop newsroom tools and reader/viewer-facing experiences that harness generative AI and automation responsibly and creatively to improve reporting, speed up workflows, and expand our coverage of local communities. This is a full-time, in-person role based in one of our HTV markets or at our corporate offices in Washington, DC or New York City.

Requirements

2-3+ years of software development experience with strong proficiency in Python; working knowledge of Jupyter, NumPy, and pandas.
Demonstrated experience implementing LLMs in newsroom-facing automation; familiarity with model capabilities and limitations.
Experience with LLM APIs (e.g.OpenAI, Bedrock, Vertex, etc.) and modern AI frameworks (e.g., LangChain; experience with LangSmith is a plus).
Experience designing prompts and evaluation strategies; comfort with guardrails, content policies, and bias/quality reviews.
Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure), serverless architectures, and containerized development/deployment (Docker).
Proficiency with Git/GitHub and modern development workflows.
Working knowledge of HTML/CSS/JavaScript and integrating services via APIs; experience with web scraping.
Familiarity, or willingness to meaningfully adopt, GenAI code-assisting tools (e.g. Cursor, Github Copilot).
Strong problem solving and project management skills; ability to prioritize multiple projects and hit deadlines.
Related military experience will be considered.

Responsibilities

Design, build, and maintain AI-powered tools that help newsrooms produce high-quality local journalism and grow audience.
Develop products and features using modern LLM APIs and open-source models, including chat/assistive tools, structured-data extraction from unstructured sources, summarization, translation, and RAG (retrieval augmented generation).
Integrate AI into existing newsroom workflows (CMS, planning, search, video, archives), minimizing repetitive tasks and speeding newsgathering.
Engineer reliable prompts and system instructions; evaluate and fine tune outputs for accuracy, fairness, and clarity.
Set up monitoring, logging, and analytics to evaluate tool quality, latency, and adoption; iterate quickly based on newsroom feedback.
Partner with product, engineering, editorial, and standards/legal teams to design audience-facing features that are brand-safe and trustworthy.