About the position
The 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 world-renowned newsroom that 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. Research & Development at The New York Times explores how emerging technologies can be applied in service of journalism. We collaborate with designers, developers, product teams, and journalists to bring new expressions of our journalism and business to life, from prototyping to production. 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 our team to help build tools and applications that use Large Language Models (LLMs) in service of The Times mission and journalistic standards. This is a hybrid-schedule role based in our New York City Headquarters. You are expected to come into the office two days per week. You will report to the Strategy Director of R&D.
Responsibilities
- Research, evaluate, deploy and/or build first- or third-party tools that allow product engineering teams to use LLMs for more tasks more effectively.
- Support LLM-backed applications using those tools, driving improvements to reach target outcomes.
- Identify evaluation and monitoring best practices – both for specific applications and to inform generalized principles for use across the company.
- Oversee technical parts of projects, developing and documenting maintenance plans.
- Lead relationships with product and editorial teams from across The Times to develop specific use cases that advance company strategy.
- Incorporate regular project feedback from key stakeholders.
- 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.
Requirements
- 5+ years professional experience with software engineering within a team environment.
- Some exposure developing applications using LLMs, including system design and architecture.
- Experience guiding development of applications from a prototype to deployment in a production environment.
Nice-to-haves
- Hands-on experience with: building with workflow orchestration tools in the LLM context (step functions, Dagster, cloud workflows, etc); evaluating LLM-backed application performance and accuracy; demonstrated experience of improving LLM application performance from baseline using strategies like prompt optimization, multi-prompt workflows, fine-tuning.
- 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 developer platforms.
Benefits
- The annual base pay range for this role is between $140,000—$155,000 USD.
