R&D Senior LLM Engineer

The New York Times • New York, NY

2d • $108 - $123 • Hybrid

About The Position

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.
Department Overview:
Research & Development at The New York Times explores how emerging technologies can be applied in service of journalism. We collaborate with designers, developers, reporters, photographers and editors to bring new forms of storytelling to life, from prototyping to publishing.
At The Times, technology permeates every aspect of our business, from our thought-provoking coverage of technological trends to the digital-first transformation of our own business to the changing world of our readers. The Research & Development team explores the new opportunities that emerging technologies may provide the New York Times and our commercial and strategic goals.
We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer with a background in applied AI to develop applications using Large Language Models (LLMs) in service of The Times mission and journalistic standards. We are looking for someone who is comfortable building projects autonomously and enjoys collaboration with a larger team. You are both curious about and skeptical of emerging technologies, excited to apply new tools, but aim to do so in service of solving important problems and making a difference for users. You take pride in your craft and understand the need to capture patterns and support future development.

Requirements

• 5+ years of professional software development experience
• Proficiency with Python and TypeScript/JavaScript
• Professional experience architecting and shipping applications that use LLMs. Experience with multi-step chaining or human-in-the-loop workflows
• Experience with LLM evaluations. Experience refining products using instrumentation, monitoring, and golden datasets to ensure accuracy and robustness
• Experience in algorithmic and AI text processing (e.g. text segmentation, semantic chunking, restructuring)

Nice To Haves

• Experience building reliable, scalable back-end services in cloud environments (e.g. GCP, AWS)
• Familiarity with AI orchestration and evaluation frameworks (e.g. AWS Step Functions, Google Cloud Workflows, Dagster, Braintrust)
• While this role will not require iOS development, some familiarity with Apple's ML ecosystem or with the unique challenges of on-device models is beneficial

Responsibilities

• Design and implement LLM-backed APIs – driving improvements to reach target outcomes through evaluation, grounding and fine-tuning best practices.
• Deploy reliable services within cloud environments (such as GCP or AWS) to support high-traffic LLM applications.
• Manage the transition of features from experimental prototypes to stable production systems in an environment with quickly evolving requirements.
• Collaborate with designers, product managers and stakeholders to translate detailed requirements into technical tasks, providing accurate estimates and progress updates.
• Maintain comprehensive documentation to facilitate feature handoff and future maintenance.
• Stay at the forefront of the rapidly evolving AI and LLM landscape, identifying and advocating for the adoption of new technologies and best practices.
• 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.

Benefits

• dependent on your role, you may be eligible for variable pay, such as an annual bonus and restricted stock.
• Benefits may include medical, dental and vision benefits, Flexible Spending Accounts (F.S.A.s), a company-matching 401(k) plan, paid vacation, paid sick days, paid parental leave, tuition reimbursement and professional development programs.

What This Job Offers

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