Senior Software Engineer, GraphQL Platform

The New York Times•New York, NY

2d•$162,000 - $195,000•Hybrid

About The Position

The Samizdat team manages The New York Times' GraphQL platform, an API layer that powers its products and internal systems. The team is modernizing the platform to improve scale and reliability as upstream data complexity grows. The role focuses on developing and operating a mission-critical distributed GraphQL platform, with an emphasis on GraphQL and developer experience. It is a hybrid role based at the New York Times headquarters in New York City, with an expectation of working in the office two days per week. The position reports to the Senior Software Engineering Manager.

Requirements

At least 5 years of software development experience focused on API development.
Expertise developing and scaling GraphQL APIs in production, with practical knowledge of federation principles such as Apollo or similar.
Experience with at least one statically typed backend language; the team uses Go.
Familiarity with automation for code quality, release management, and developer workflow improvements.
Experience delivering projects from design through implementation, testing, and documentation.
A commitment to learning and improvement, sharing knowledge, and welcoming constructive feedback.

Nice To Haves

Background working with Apollo GraphQL, including Router, Federation, schema design, and plugins or extensions.
Knowledge of API performance optimization under high traffic, CDN integration, caching, and multi-region operations.
Experience troubleshooting and improving observability for a platform distributed across multiple systems.
Experience deploying and maintaining applications on Kubernetes.

Responsibilities

Develop new platform offerings and ensure the GraphQL platform's reliability, scalability, and performance.
Establish and enforce GraphQL schema design and governance best practices, participate in platform-wide schema working groups, and review and mentor cross-team contributions.
Contribute to platform automation, developer tooling, and onboarding and kickoff guides for service adopters and subgraph contributors.
Support on-call, incident response, and troubleshooting for platform-level escalations.
Mentor team members and promote technical excellence and a culture of respect and constructive feedback.
Support and understand the company's value of journalistic independence and its mission to seek the truth and help people understand the world.