Staff Software Engineer, New York Magazine

Vox Media Group•New York, NY

4d•$160,000 - $220,000

About The Position

Vox Media Group LLC is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to help shape the technology behind New York Magazine’s journalism and consumer subscriptions business. The role focuses primarily on the websites, publishing platform, and subscription experiences supporting New York, The Cut, Vulture, Intelligencer, The Strategist, Grub Street, and Curbed, with contributions to NYMag’s iOS and Android apps. As a hands-on technical engineering leader, you will help editors publish stories, readers discover journalism, and subscribers get value from their relationship with the brands. Your work spans editorial experiences and the subscriber journey, including registration, purchase, onboarding, account management, and ongoing engagement. You will partner with product, design, editorial, and consumer revenue teams to guide technical decisions and deliver web and mobile improvements, while advancing responsible AI and agentic workflows to improve engineering delivery and efficiency. The web platform uses Node.js, Express, Clay CMS, Vue, and Handlebars. The mobile app uses TypeScript, React Native, and Expo. The role works across these technologies and the services connecting content, customer accounts, and subscriptions. Vox Media values curiosity, trust, respect, clear communication, knowledge sharing, and helping the team succeed.

Requirements

Deep JavaScript expertise and substantial experience building and operating production web applications and Node.js services.
Track record of leading complex technical initiatives across systems or teams, with impact beyond individual contributions.
Strong frontend fundamentals, including HTML, CSS, accessibility, browser behavior, and application performance, alongside experience with frameworks such as Vue or React.
Experience designing APIs, data models, and integrations, including reliable handling of authentication, authorization, and transactional workflows.
Sound judgment when evolving mature codebases, including knowing when to extend existing patterns and when to introduce new approaches.
Strong debugging and testing skills, with experience diagnosing problems across application, service, and data boundaries.
Ability to connect engineering decisions to reader experience and business outcomes, including subscription conversion, engagement, and retention.
Experience using AI development tools responsibly, including providing useful context, evaluating generated output, and recognizing when human review and decision-making are essential.
Clear communication and collaborative technical leadership.
Ability to contribute to a TypeScript and React Native codebase.

Nice To Haves

Experience in consumer subscriptions, digital media, ecommerce, or other businesses built around recurring customer relationships.
Experience with paywalls, payment platforms, subscription billing integrations, identity systems, or entitlement management.
Experience with experimentation platforms, conversion analytics, and customer lifecycle experiences.
Experience with React Native, Expo, or shipping applications for iOS and Android.
Experience with content management systems, editorial workflows, PostgreSQL, Redis, or Elasticsearch.
Experience building reusable AI workflows, agent tooling, or automation that improves engineering productivity.

Responsibilities

Lead complex engineering initiatives by translating product and business needs into technical plans, aligning collaborators on architectural decisions, and guiding projects from discovery through delivery and operation.
Build and improve consumer subscription experiences, including offers, checkout, promotions, gifting, onboarding, and account management features supporting acquisition, conversion, and retention.
Improve integrations connecting authentication, payments, subscription status, and content entitlements so readers can reliably access purchases across web and mobile.
Partner with consumer revenue, product, and analytics teams to improve paywalls, registration experiences, and subscription journeys through reliable experiments and measurable results.
Evolve the publishing platform by building reusable components, editorial tools, and reader experiences that support brand needs and make publishing easier.
Contribute to the NYMag mobile app in partnership with mobile engineers, including reading experiences, content discovery, subscriber features, and APIs and content models for consistent cross-platform experiences.
Guide incremental modernization by identifying architectural risks and technical debt, improving developer workflows, and balancing near-term delivery with long-term maintainability.
Improve quality and reliability by investigating production issues, strengthening automated testing and observability, and addressing performance, accessibility, and security.
Develop and refine responsible AI-assisted and agentic workflows for implementation, testing, debugging, review, and documentation; protect sensitive information, validate generated changes, and remain accountable for the resulting software.
Mentor engineers, lead constructive code and design reviews, document important decisions, and establish shared practices that improve team effectiveness.