About the Role:

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 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.

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
• Contribute to and help maintain 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
• 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
• Participate in code review, reading teammates' code and providing feedback
• Contribute to robust testing strategies to ensure service reliability
• Share knowledge with teammates through documentation, design discussions, and pairing
• 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

Basic Qualifications:

• 2+ years of software engineering experience, with a focus on backend development.
• 2+ years of experience in one or more backend programming languages such as Python or Go.
• Experience building and operating APIs and services in a production environment.
• Exposure to building applications with Large Language Models (LLMs), or familiarity with the surrounding ecosystem (e.g., orchestration, retrieval-augmented generation).

Preferred Qualifications:

• 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)
• 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
• Experience designing distributed systems at scale

#LI-Hybrid

REQ-020494

The annual base pay range for this role is between:

$110,000-$130,000 USD

Candidate Use of GenAI Tools:

We're excited to learn more about you and your experience. To keep our hiring process as fair and authentic as possible, we ask that you submit your own work and not use GenAI tools to generate substantive content during the application and interview process.

If you're an engineering candidate, we'll let you know what specific GenAI tools you are permitted to use for your technical assessment.