R&D Senior Engineer

Mission Overview & Responsibilities: 

Research & Development at The New York Times explores how emerging technologies can be applied in service of journalism. We collaborate with designers, developers, reporters, photographers and editors to bring new forms of storytelling to life, from prototyping to publishing.

At The Times, technology permeates every aspect of our business, from our thought-provoking coverage of technological trends to the digital-first transformation of our own business to the changing world of our readers. The R&D team explores the new opportunities that emerging technologies may provide media organizations over the next 12-18 months.

We are looking for a senior engineer to join R&D as a technical leader for our team as we advance our ambitions, especially around uses of artificial intelligence across the company.

You will report into the Technical Director of R&D.

What you’ll do:

• Provide technical leadership across R&D products from initial design phase through launch — translating new feature requirements into scalable products while ensuring maintenance engineering excellence and velocity across the product stack.
• Contribute to technical prototyping and product development that influences company-level decisions about uses of emerging technology. 
• Lead the effort to integrate experiments, products, and systems with newsroom and product teams. Ensure all projects are scalable within our technology infrastructure.
• Lead evaluations of new technologies as they relate to company needs and potential partnerships.
• Support team engineers on architecture, development, testing, delivery, and operations.
• Develop and maintain best practices for R&D engineers via consistent feedback, mentorship. 
• Assist the recruiting and hiring of technical talent. Select engineers who can contribute to exceptional emerging technology engineering work.

Basic Qualifications:

You are comfortable building projects by yourself and enjoy collaboration with a larger team. You are both curious and skeptical of emerging technologies. You're excited to apply new tools, but aim to do so in service of solving important problems and making a difference for users. You take pride in your craft and understand the need to capture patterns and support future development.

• 6+ years experience working with teams and delivering projects.
• 2+ years experience developing applications of artificial intelligence, including system design and architecture.
• 2+ years experience building full stack web applications with frontend Javascript frameworks/libraries (e.g React/Svelte).

Preferred Qualifications:

• Hands-on experience with: evaluating model performance and accuracy; machine learning frameworks (PyTorch/TensorFlow), pipelines and workflows; leveraging cloud infrastructure for training and serving models; tuning machine learning models for specific use cases.
• Experience building and operating complex distributed systems at scale, in GCP and/or AWS; contributing to and maintaining software projects; developing reusable software tools and practices.
• Experience with CI/CD techniques and tooling; e.g. Argo/Drone
• Experience guiding development from a prototype to deployment in a production environment.

To apply, please provide work samples (code snippets, URLs, project summaries) describing your most relevant work for this position and how it expresses your approach to software engineering.

REQ-014447