Senior Software Engineer, GraphQL Platform

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.

About the Role

This team manages the New York Times' GraphQL platform. Our mission is to provide a robust API layer powering our products and internal systems. We are in an exciting period of modernization, driving scale and reliability as our upstream data complexity grows. We are seeking a GraphQL and Developer Experience enthusiast to join our team and contribute to our mission-critical distributed platform.

Responsibilities:

• Develop new platform offerings while ensuring the reliability, scalability, and performance of our GraphQL platform as it continues to grow

• Lead by example in establishing and enforcing GraphQL schema design and governance best practices, participating in platform-wide schema working groups, and reviewing/mentoring cross-team contributions

• Contribute to the platform's automation, developer tooling, and onboarding/kick-off guides for service adopters and subgraph contributors

• Support on-call, incident response, and troubleshooting efforts for platform-level escalations

• Mentor team members, promoting technical excellence and a culture of respect and constructive feedback

• 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

• You will report to the Senior Software Engineering Manager

Basic Qualifications:

• You have 5+ years of software development experience with a focus on API development

• You have expertise developing and scaling GraphQL APIs in production, with practical knowledge of federation principles (Apollo or similar)

• Your background includes at least one statically typed backend language (we use Go)

• You are familiar with automation for code quality, release management, and developer workflow improvements

• You have experience delivering projects from design to implementation, testing and documentation

• You value learning and improvement, sharing knowledge, and welcoming constructive feedback

Preferred Qualifications:

• Background working with Apollo GraphQL (Router, Federation, schema design, plugins/extensions)

• Knowledge of performance optimization for APIs under high traffic, CDN integration, caching, and multi-region operations

• Experience troubleshooting and improving observability for a platform distributed across multiple systems

• Experience deploying and maintaining applications on Kubernetes

This is a hybrid role.

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

#LI-Hybrid

REQ-018720

The annual base pay range for this role is between:
$140,000—$160,000 USD

For roles in the U.S., dependent on your role, you may be eligible for variable pay, such as an annual bonus and restricted stock. Benefits may include medical, dental and vision benefits, Flexible Spending Accounts (F.S.A.s), a company-matching 401(k) plan, paid vacation, paid sick days, paid parental leave, tuition reimbursement and professional development programs.

For roles outside of the U.S., information on benefits will be provided during the interview process.

The New York Times Company is committed to being the world’s best source of independent, reliable and quality journalism. To do so, we embrace a diverse workforce that has a broad range of backgrounds and experiences across our ranks, at all levels of the organization. We encourage people from all backgrounds to apply.

We are an Equal Opportunity Employer and do 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 U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC)’s Know Your Rights Poster is available here.

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