Senior Software Engineer

The Washington Post•Washington, DC

18d•$119,700 - $199,300•Onsite

About The Position

We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer to help shape the future of newsletter and content delivery at The Washington Post. This role will own and expand engineering capabilities across our Iterable platform and newsroom-facing tools built around Arc. With the initial migration from Carta to Iterable largely complete, the next phase is about going beyond platform replacement. This engineer will help build sophisticated audience journeys, reusable templates and content systems, data integrations, personalization capabilities, and workflows that allow the newsroom to reach readers in more targeted and effective ways. The Content Delivery team is small and highly collaborative, supporting critical publishing surfaces and tools used across the newsroom. This role will provide the senior technical ownership and capacity needed to scale those systems, reduce reliance on one-off solutions, and turn new editorial and audience opportunities into durable products.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
At least eight years of relevant technical experience, including six or more years in software development.
Strong experience building production applications with JavaScript or TypeScript.
Strong experience with React or a similar component-based front-end framework.
Experience designing and integrating REST or JSON APIs and working with structured content and data.
Experience developing backend services using Node.js or another server-side technology.
Ability to independently lead complex features or engineering initiatives from definition through delivery.
Experience producing maintainable, reusable, tested, and well-documented code.
Strong analytical, debugging, and problem-solving skills.
Experience with automated testing, quality assurance, monitoring, and production support.
Ability to evaluate technical trade-offs involving scalability, reliability, maintainability, and delivery speed.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including experience collaborating with non-technical stakeholders.
Experience mentoring engineers, reviewing code, and sharing technical knowledge.

Nice To Haves

Hands-on experience with Iterable or another enterprise marketing automation or customer engagement platform.
Experience developing dynamic templates using Handlebars or a similar templating language.
Experience building campaign journeys, audience segmentation, personalization, or event-driven messaging workflows.
Experience with content management systems, publishing platforms, newsroom tools, or media products.
Experience building extensions or integrations for Arc XP or another enterprise publishing platform.
Experience with Amazon Web Services, including services such as Lambda, S3, CloudWatch, EventBridge, Step Functions, or API Gateway.
Experience with Node.js frameworks such as NestJS.
Experience with Spring Boot, Kotlin, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, or similar backend technologies.
Experience building data feeds and integrations across content, customer, analytics, or marketing systems.
Experience with observability tools such as CloudWatch, Datadog, Splunk, or similar platforms.
Experience working on high-volume email, notification, or content-distribution systems.
Experience using AI-assisted development tools such as GitHub Copilot, Claude, Cursor, Kiro, or similar tools as part of an engineering workflow.

Responsibilities

Lead the development and evolution of newsletter and content-delivery capabilities within Iterable.
Design and build sophisticated campaigns, journeys, personalization features, and audience-targeting workflows.
Develop and maintain reusable newsletter templates and Handlebars-based content components that reduce duplication and support consistent rendering.
Build and support integrations between Iterable, Arc, newsroom systems, data feeds, content APIs, and backend services.
Contribute to newsroom-facing Arc extensions and tools used to create, curate, preview, validate, and distribute content.
Partner with editorial, product, Marketing, Subscriptions, and engineering teams to define requirements, shape MVPs, and identify scalable solutions.
Lead features and larger initiatives independently, from technical design and implementation through rollout and ongoing support.
Evaluate existing systems and workflows, identify areas of operational or technical risk, and recommend improvements.
Write modular, testable, reusable, and well-documented code across front-end and backend systems.
Improve platform reliability through automated testing, observability, alerting, documentation, and thoughtful production support practices.
Review pull requests promptly and provide constructive technical guidance that helps unblock and develop other engineers.
Make pragmatic decisions about scope, technical debt, and delivery timelines while clearly communicating risks and trade-offs.
Use AI-assisted development tools responsibly to accelerate prototyping, implementation, testing, documentation, and investigation.
Share platform knowledge across the team to reduce single points of failure and strengthen long-term ownership.
Mentor engineers and contribute to team practices, technical standards, hiring, and engineering culture.