The [Register to View] target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">mission of The New York Times is to seek the truth and help people understand the world. That means independent journalism is at the heart of all we do as a company. It’s why we have a newsroom that’s 1,700 strong and sends journalists to report on the ground from nearly 160 countries. It’s why we focus deeply on how our readers will experience our journalism, from print to audio to a world-class digital and app destination. And it’s why our business strategy centers on making journalism so good that it’s worth paying for.

Note for US based roles: Any offer of employment is contingent on providing proof of Covid-19 vaccination prior to your start date, subject to approved medical and/or religious exemptions, in accordance with applicable law.

Job Description

As The New York Times seeks to become “[Register to View] target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">a world class digital media business” we are expanding our investment in engineering. The Content Delivery Principal Engineer position is a key role in helping us build an engineering organization primed to deliver world-class platforms that elevate the work of our journalists as well as the content and products that they produce.

About the Team

Content Delivery is a team that is central to the technical strategy and evolution at The New York Times, designed to propel the growth of the business by creating highly leverageable platforms and services in support of content delivery and supporting web and mobile teams in preparing content for presentation. The following are the teams that build out such platforms and services:

Publishing Pipeline: provide capabilities that normalize content from a range of disparate sources

API Gateway: provide systems that prepare content for consumption by a range of different presentation layers

Mobile Platforms: provide shareable libraries, tools, and services that help other teams build mobile apps

Web Platforms: provide sharable platforms, libraries, tools, and services that help other teams build web-based applications

Content Delivery’s work lies at the heart of our strategy to elevate our engineering efforts. By providing shareable platforms and services, Content Delivery also works very closely with a wide array of internal teams, including: our infrastructure team; front-end teams; content management teams; data teams; teams building games, cooking, interactive, and audio content; advertising teams; and more.

The Content Delivery team will be engaged in several key technical initiatives that are core to the New York Times product strategy. This includes, but is not limited to, support for personalization of content delivery to our subscriber base, evolution of our mobile and web presentation layers, adoption of our long term cloud strategy and continued optimization of our readers experience. As a principal engineer in the Content Delivery team you will play a key role in defining this technical vision and supporting its adoption internal and external to the team.

You will:

• Provide technical leadership to the engineers in the Content Delivery group and beyond

• Drive effective decision making across the Content Delivery group regarding architecture, design, and implementation details

• Migrate a tightly-coupled architecture (e.g., monolith or distributed monolith) to a distributed system with discrete loosely-coupled services

• Evaluate multiple database models as well as design trade-offs between ACID and Eventual Consistency transactions

• Ensure that our Content Delivery systems are highly available, scalable, secure, observable, operable, and performant while scaling to with our ambitious growth goals.

• Engage in collaborative discussions across the group to garner buy-in on your technical strategy

• Design for long-term scalability

• Influence organizational-wide technical decisions

You should apply if you have:

• Experience working with web/mobile technologies

• Extensive experience building distributed systems in the cloud, from concept through production

• Strong understanding of concurrency patterns and fault-tolerant design

• Experience using telemetry and metrics to drive operational excellence

• Experience with container orchestration technologies: e.g., Kubernetes, service mesh, etc

• Experience with Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery techniques and tooling

• Practical experience with traffic shaping for services with unpredictable load patterns

• Helped make pragmatic decisions between delivery of new capabilities and repayment of technical debt

• Mentored engineers while providing coaching where needed to level up the group’s abilities

• A product mindset, in which engineering costs are evaluated against benefits to our users

• Comfort navigating uncertainty and driving clarity on long-term cross-team initiatives

Our Values

• The New York Times is committed to a diverse and inclusive workforce, one that reflects the varied global community that we serve. Our journalism and the products we build in the service of that journalism greatly benefit from a range of perspectives that can only come from diversity across our ranks, at all levels of the organization. Our dedication to diversity and inclusion is the right thing to do, and it is also the smart thing for our business.

• We have 11 employee-led groups for people who share identities and interests, ranging from the Arab Collective to Young Professionals. These groups help to build an inclusive community and host over 100 events a year.

• We value transparency. Our processes reflect this. We share roadmaps, ideas, praise, constructive criticism, and generally over-communicate. When we have something to say to someone or ask of someone, we go and find them and say or ask them directly.

• We clean up. We have seen firsthand the effects of sprawl, neglect, and things left unfinished. We finish, we clean up, we close the loop. We celebrate simplification and retiring the old.

• We learn from failure. This means an open examination of what went wrong, through blameless post-mortems, five why’s, etc., and, whenever possible, failing to a state that a) works and b) defaults to availability for our users.

• We value technical leadership equally to and alongside management. We use our technical professional tracks to identify the people that we have entrusted with technical leadership. These individuals are very important within our organization.

• Our technical leaders also teach and mentor our team members. They are the key to us continuously improving our technical capability.

#LI-AM1

The New York Times is committed to a diverse and inclusive workforce, one that reflects the varied global community we serve. Our journalism and the products we build in the service of that journalism greatly benefit from a range of perspectives, which can only come from diversity of all types, across our ranks, at all levels of the organization. Achieving true diversity and inclusion is the right thing to do. It is also the smart thing for our business. So we strongly encourage women, veterans, people with disabilities, people of color and gender nonconforming candidates to apply.

The New York Times Company is an Equal Opportunity Employer and does not discriminate on the basis of an individual's sex, age, race, color, creed, national origin, alienage, religion, marital status, pregnancy, sexual orientation or affectional preference, gender identity and expression, disability, genetic trait or predisposition, carrier status, citizenship, veteran or military status and other personal characteristics protected by law. All applications will receive consideration for employment without regard to legally protected characteristics. The New York Times Company will consider qualified applicants, including those with criminal histories, in a manner consistent with the requirements of applicable state and local "Fair Chance" laws.