Software Engineer, Developer Platforms and Generative AI

The New York Times•New York, NY

4d•$110,000 - $130,000•Hybrid

About The Position

The New York Times is seeking a Software Engineer for the Developer Platforms organization, specifically on the Developer AI team. This team focuses on enhancing the developer experience with Generative AI (GenAI) tools and agentic workflows. They provide standardized solutions to make it easier for product engineers to build and operate reliable software using AI-augmented methods. The team works with tools like Claude Code, Cursor, and Copilot to assist with debugging, migrations, test generation, and general development in a secure and measurable manner. The role involves reporting to the Engineering Manager of the Developer AI team and contributing to GenAI-augmented developer experiences and platform capabilities used across The New York Times. The engineer will collaborate with senior team members on well-scoped projects to improve how engineers build, test, and deploy software. A key aspect of the role is defining how engineers design and operate their own agents and agentic workflows, transforming experiments into reusable patterns and ensuring safe deployment on the internal platform. The work aims to help teams ship faster and more safely, reduce technical debt through modernization, and turn internal practices into reusable tools. Collaboration with partner teams, ensuring service reliability and security, and skill development in cloud-native engineering, internal platforms, and practical GenAI are also emphasized. The team operates on shorter planning horizons, typically in six-week increments, to quickly adapt to the evolving GenAI ecosystem. The role includes limited on-call responsibilities.

Requirements

3+ years of professional software engineering experience building cloud-native applications (we primarily use Go)
1–2 years improving developer experience through workflows, documentation, or internal platforms (for example, building CI/CD improvements, internal tooling, or onboarding guides for other engineers)
1–2 years working with Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud Platform
1+ years using GenAI tools like GitHub Copilot, Cursor, or Claude Code as part of your daily development
Experience learning new tools and patterns and asking clear questions when requirements or tradeoffs are ambiguous
High level of empathy towards coworkers and existing solutions; you're curious about how other engineers work and motivated to make their experience better
Comfort working in a fast-evolving GenAI and agentic landscape, where new capabilities, usage data, and experiments, inform our priorities

Nice To Haves

3+ years working with AWS in depth, including designing and operating production services
Production experience with Go (Golang), including debugging and helping users or partner teams troubleshoot issues
Experience deploying and troubleshooting workloads on Kubernetes (EKS) and related observability tooling
Experience in prompt engineering or building AI-powered internal tools that integrate directly into developer workflows
Experience contributing to internal platforms or shared libraries that are used by multiple teams
Experience helping define opinionated patterns, guardrails, or internal standards for how other teams adopt new tools or workflows, especially in fast-changing domains like GenAI

Responsibilities

Deliver GenAI-powered developer tooling—such as prompts, IDE integrations, skills, and telemetry. You'll help us understand and improve how we deploy and use these tools.
Contribute to the GenAI developer platform: services and integrations built on top of https://www.litellm.ai/ to power both local and background/long-running agents.
Implement and maintain guardrails and observability for agentic workflows, to integrate them with DataDog, DX, and FinOut.
Partner with platform and product teams to define how engineers build their own agentic workflows and custom agents.
Deliver self-service APIs, templates, and documentation that make it easy and safe for engineers to build and operate team-specific agents as part of their everyday development workflows.
Experiment with new GenAI and agentic capabilities, evaluate what works in practice. You'll turn successful experiments into paved paths that can be adopted at scale.
Work with engineers and managers across Product Engineering to understand how they build software today to design solutions that actually fit the way they work.
Demonstrate support and understanding of our Values and a strong commitment to our mission to seek the truth and help people understand the world.