Senior Software Engineer, AI Platforms and Products

Senior Software Engineer, AI Platforms and Products

Location: New York, NY (Hybrid - typically 2 days/week in office)
Reporting to: Director of AI Platforms

About the Role

The New AI Products and Platforms division seeks a Senior Software Engineer to develop backend services and infrastructure for an internal AI Platform. This platform will empower teams across the organization to build, deploy, and manage applications that use large language models (LLMs) to advance our journalism and our business.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain scalable backend services and APIs for a central platform used by teams creating AI applications
• Own core platform components including systems for prompt and workflow management, evaluation, tracing, and monitoring for cost, usage, and performance
• Build and operate vector database and retrieval infrastructure for search and AI-powered discovery
• Design and develop retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines and agentic workflows
• Build orchestration layers for multi-step AI workflows managing LLM calls, retrieval, and business logic
• Develop infrastructure enabling teams to create and manage AI applications with metadata, observability, and access controls
• Architect and implement data pipelines and storage solutions for AI systems
• Write high-quality, maintainable, well-tested code primarily in Python or Go
• Ensure code quality, security, and system observability
• Collaborate with editorial, product, ML, and data teams to translate requirements into platform capabilities
• Conduct code reviews and provide feedback to team members
• Contribute to testing strategies ensuring service reliability
• Mentor other software engineers
• Support the organization's value of journalistic independence and commitment to seeking truth

Basic Qualifications

• 5+ years software engineering experience with strong backend focus
• 5+ years experience in backend programming languages (Python or Go)
• 5+ years designing, building, and operating distributed systems and APIs at scale
• 1+ years building applications with Large Language Models and familiarity with the surrounding ecosystem

Preferred Qualifications

• MLOps experience including model and prompt evaluation, tracing, and monitoring systems
• Vector database and embedding model/service experience
• Information retrieval or search systems background
• RAG systems or agentic AI workflow development
• Prompt engineering and management systems experience
• Docker and Kubernetes containerization and orchestration knowledge
• Infrastructure as code experience (Terraform, CloudFormation)
• Cloud platform expertise (GCP or AWS) and associated services
• Event-driven architecture experience (Kafka, Pub/Sub)
• LLM orchestration and agentic frameworks familiarity
• GraphQL experience

Compensation & Benefits
Annual Base Pay Range: $140,000 - $160,000 USD
Additional Compensation & Benefits: Variable pay including annual bonus and restricted stock eligibility; medical, dental, and vision benefits; FSAs; company-matching 401(k); paid vacation and sick days; paid parental leave; tuition reimbursement; professional development programs.

On-Call Requirements: Limited on-call hours; schedule determined upon hire based on team size and variables.

Equal Opportunity Statement
The New York Times Company commits to equal opportunity employment without discrimination based on protected characteristics.