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

Client has been fulfilling its mission to “seek the truth and help people understand the world” for nearly 170 years by delivering world-class journalism.  More recently, this mission has been augmented by a deep investment in digital subscriptions and products. During the 2020 U.S. election week, 273 million readers from all over the world came to The NY Times.  Today we have over eight million subscribers to read news, enjoy games, try recipes, get help with shopping, and listen to podcasts. Recently, we acquired The Athletic for $550 million. Seeks to become “a world-class digital media business,” we are expanding our investment in engineering. 

The Senior Manager of Web Platforms plays a crucial role in helping us deliver world-class web platforms and services that elevate the work of our journalists, developers, and the content and products they produce.

The Team 

The Web Platforms team is accountable for building tools, systems, and services that help our many web engineers in various product feature teams do their jobs more effectively.  This enables web engineers to focus on the user experience and on building better products and not on how web product releases are tested, deployed, hosted, or scaled.

Web Platforms currently operates web services built in Node, React, and GraphQL. These services are our web rendering backends for desktop users coming through a CDN or mobile users loading web views in our iOS and Android native applications.

As the company continues to grow, so will the technical challenges on the Web Platforms team.   We expect to shift our approach towards a more compute-heavy environment which will challenge our current assumptions around CDN caching and our broader architecture. 

The Web Platforms team is also expanding support for the breadth of the product portfolio, including the News site, as well as for other products such as Games and Cooking.  Throughout that increase in demand for our platforms, we need to ensure that developer tooling, deployment processes, and observability of web services can continue to be adopted and scaled accordingly.

Check out some of the open-source projects created by engineers in Web Platforms: kyt, react-helmet-async,  fast-memoize.js, HTTPretty.

The Role 

You will develop the careers and influence the technical direction for a team of full-stack engineers so that they continue to:

• Ensure that more than 50+ web engineers from 25+ product feature teams can learn and effectively implement best practices.

• Collaborate with our Infrastructure teams to improve the CI/CD workflow that allows web engineers to successfully merge about 160 pull requests and push about 35 production releases per month.

• Validate as much as possible that web releases maintain the quality of our reader experience and do not introduce functional or performance regressions.

• Design web services that can handle unpredictable spikes of traffic driven by the global news cycle.

This role is open to full-time remote or NYC Based in-office employees.

About the Opportunity

Responsibilities

• Build and manage a high-performance, talented, and diverse engineering team

• Partner with each engineer to develop a plan for their professional growth.

• Source, recruit, and hire talented candidates from diverse backgrounds for your team and the larger engineering organization.

• Work with the team to further develop its three main areas of focus:

  • The extensibility of web platforms in response to business needs.

  • The quality of releases in terms of user experience and web performance.

  • The reliability of web infrastructure in terms of its operation and scalability.

• Work closely with Product Management to align on short- and long-term goals, priorities, and road maps and partner on broader org communications.

• Ensure that Engineering, Product, and Program management leadership continues to track, understand, and recognize your team’s impact on the organization.

• Work closely with Infrastructure teams to ensure appropriate distribution of responsibilities.

• Work with your peers in the other platform teams so that your work complements the work of the others to achieve our software platform goals collaboratively.

• Pursue engineering excellence with respect and humility.

Required experience

• You have experience building centralized infrastructure, platforms, services, and other technologies that internal engineering teams use.

• You have experience balancing and navigating the trade-offs between maintaining existing systems while moving organizations onto new and evolving technology stacks.

• You know what it takes to build large-scale distributed systems designed to be highly reliable, scalable, secure, and observable.

• You have experience scaling applications developed in a Node.js framework, such as React or Next.js, in a production environment.

About our Engineering Organization

• We’ve won more Pulitzer Prizes than any other organization (including three in 2020), and you can celebrate with the award winners in our newsroom.

• We believe diversity fuels innovation and creativity, and we have a variety of employee groups dedicated to fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace.

• We are a New York-based engineering organization with a remote-friendly workplace that includes engineers around the world.

• We are committed to career development and have a formal mentoring program. We encourage our engineers to participate in conferences and we frequently host talks by industry leaders (Sheryl Sandberg, Melinda Gates, and Ta-Nehisi Coates are a few recent examples).

• Every person within the tech organization is expected to dedicate five full days per year to learning in addition to continuous growth opportunities throughout the year. We have a generous tuition reimbursement program and you can use this time on career-relevant activities like attending a formal class, internal company training, online training, a self-developed learning program, or even by teaching others.

• We run a Maker Week event once a year, where Design, Product, Project, Marketing, and Technology come together to work on compelling, creative, cross-functional projects.

Benefits and Perks

• Make an impact by supporting our original, independent, and deeply reported journalism.

• We provide competitive health, dental, vision, and life insurance for employees and their families.

• We support responsible retirement planning with a generous 401(k) company match.

• We offer a competitive parental leave.

• We are committed to career development and ongoing learning supported by a formal mentoring program as well as $8,000 annually for tuition reimbursement.

• We have frequent panel discussions and talks by a wide variety of newsmakers and industry leaders.

• Join a community committed to the richness of diversity, experiences, and talents in the world we cover, supported by a variety of employee resource groups.