Senior Software Engineer, AI Platforms and Products

The New York Times•New York, NY

1d•Hybrid

About The Position

The New AI Products and Platforms mission is a central hub for new, high-ambition AI opportunities and services at The Times. We are hiring a Senior Software Engineer to help build the backend services and infrastructure that will form our internal AI Platform. This platform will enable teams across the company to build, deploy, and manage applications that use large language models (LLMs) to advance our journalism and our business. You will report to the Director of AI Platforms and work with a team of engineers, designers, product and project managers, data scientists, and newsroom stakeholders to make investments in AI possible across The Times. This is a hybrid position based in our New York City headquarters. You can typically expect to come into the office two days per week.

Requirements

5+ years of software engineering experience, with a strong focus on backend development.
5+ years of experience in one or more backend programming languages such as Python or Go.
5+ years of experience designing, building, and operating distributed systems and APIs at scale.
1+ years of experience building applications with Large Language Models (LLMs) and familiarity with the surrounding ecosystem (e.g., orchestration, retrieval-augmented generation).

Nice To Haves

Experience with MLOps, including building systems for model and prompt evaluation, tracing, and monitoring.
Experience with vector databases and embedding models or services.
Experience with information retrieval or search systems.
Experience building RAG systems or agentic AI workflows.
Experience with prompt engineering and prompt management systems.
Familiarity with containerization and orchestration technologies like Docker and Kubernetes.
Experience with infrastructure as code (e.g., Terraform, CloudFormation).
Deep experience with cloud computing platforms like GCP or AWS and their associated services (e.g., Cloud Functions, S3, RDS).
Experience with event-driven architectures and technologies such as Kafka or Pub/Sub.
Familiarity with LLM orchestration and agentic frameworks.
Experience with GraphQL.

Responsibilities

Design, build, and maintain scalable and reliable backend services and APIs for a central platform used by teams building AI applications across our journalism and our business.
Take ownership of core platform components and integrations, including systems for prompt and workflow management, evaluation and tracing, and monitoring for cost, usage, and performance.
Build and operate vector database and retrieval infrastructure to support search and AI-powered discovery experiences.
Design and develop retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines and agentic workflows that connect our content, data, and AI models.
Build orchestration layers for multi-step AI workflows, managing the coordination of LLM calls, retrieval, and business logic.
Develop the infrastructure that enables teams to create and manage their AI applications, complete with metadata, observability, and access controls.
Architect and implement data pipelines and storage solutions to support our AI systems.
Write high-quality, maintainable, and well-tested code, primarily in backend languages like Python or Go.
Ensure a high degree of code quality, security, and system observability.
Collaborate with editorial, product, ML, and data teams to translate requirements into platform capabilities.
Review code written by other software engineers on the team and provide feedback.
Contribute to and advocate for robust testing strategies to ensure service reliability.
Be a mentor to other software engineers to enable their growth.
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.