Principal Engineer, Games

The New York Times has exciting subscription goals and we will continue to invest into our engineering to deliver a world class digital experience for our customers.

We continue to see huge value in investing into our Games mission both as a standalone subscription opportunity and a valuable member of the NYTimes bundle which also includes Core News, Cooking, Wirecutter and The Athletic.

You will be a strategic technical lead to bring engineering strategy for the backend platform powering our Games. You will implement a multi year cloud strategy to modernize Games backend platform and take it to a level where adding new games and making major changes to existing games is done with speed and efficiency.

You will report into and be the technical partner of the Head Of Engineering, Games.

The Games team of The New York Times — the group behind Wordle, Spelling Bee, the daily crossword, and more —is a collaborative team that values inclusion, diversity and personal growth

We combine product development with a world-class suite of puzzles including beloved titles such as the NYT Crossword, Spelling Bee, and Wordle. We are on a mission to build high-quality gaming experiences to accelerate our subscriber growth by directly targeting digital puzzle players with a multi-puzzle games subscription. We also believe that launching successful and hit Games is important for sustained growth.

We maintain the end-to-end technology behind our Games across web and mobile surfaces. Our team consists of multiple squads and we work with Product, Design and Producers to implement our work in a collaborative way.

• Collaborate with Games Mission leadership and work on multi year strategy to modernize Games backend infrastructure on AWS
• Work with backend engineers within Games Mission as well Delivery Engineering team to architect and build systems using technologies widely used by engineering organization
• Create sweeping improvements in stability, performance, security and scalability across all Games backend systems
• Lead conversations about the direction of major areas of the technology; bring company-wide agreement to the use of this direction
• Work with cross functional teams and convert business requirements into technical strategies
• Work with web and mobile engineers across all teams in Games mission to build backend services to support their data needs

• 10+ years experience building highly-scalable and high throughput applications
• 3+ years of hands on experience running applications in Cloud (GCP, AWS)
• Expert in architecting and developing performant, fault tolerant and well tested APIs
• Expertise in Go, Java or a similar modern object-oriented language
• A commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion; as well as mentoring and coaching other engineers 

• You routinely stay current with industry trends and latest technologies, with a focus on growth and learning 
• Comfort navigating uncertainty and driving clarity on long-term projects.
• You have experience translating high-level requirements into technical strategies and system design
• You are enthusiastic about the New York Times mission. You play NYT Games (Wordle, Spelling Bee, Crossword) or have interest in learning about them
• Engineering experience building backend tech in Gaming industry

This role may require limited on-call hours. An on-call schedule will be determined when you join, taking into account team size and other variables.

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