Principal Engineer

Condé Nast is one of the world's most renowned media publishing companies, creating and distributing every type of media today, spanning print and digital publishing in all formats. With a portfolio of some of today's most influential brands, the company continues to grow its audience through a global operational and content infrastructure across its 12 owned and operated markets. Headquartered in New York City, the company's owned and operated markets include China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico & Latin America, Spain, Taiwan, UAE/Dubai, the U.K., and the U.S., with additional local license partners in over twenty additional markets across the globe.

Lead brands include Vogue, The New Yorker, GQ, Architectural Digest, Condé Nast Traveler, Vanity Fair, Wired, Allure, Ars Technica, Bon Appétit, House & Garden, Pitchfork, Tatler, and Vogue Business.

Job Description

Location:

New York, NY

Condé Nast is a global media company producing the world's most iconic lifestyle, journalism, and fashion brands. We aim to inspire, inform and entertain our audiences through our portfolio of well known brands such as Vogue, Wired, Vanity Fair, Architectural Digest, GQ and many other leading brands. We are undertaking the major transformation of teams and systems: organizing for speed, ownership and customer focus with smaller teams, fewer hand-offs, and AI native in how we work.

Engineering is responsible for scaling, building and deploying the experiences that serve our audiences globally, and the consumer-facing surface of that is evolving to meet our audience’s evolving needs.

We are seeking a principal-level technical authority to own how that stack is architected, how it reaches the reader, and what "good" looks like at every layer between our systems and the browser. This role will set technical direction, make the architectural decisions that other engineers build against, and uphold the standards that protect the reader experience. This is a hands‑on principal role: you lead by both influence and taking on work directly in an AI‑native approach.

• Front‑End Architecture & Stack Evolution Serve as the principal technical authority on front-end architecture for our web application framework, making the foundational calls on component design, state management, rendering strategy and what the rebuilt stack's non‑negotiables must be.
• Drive the implementation of an island architecture which teams build against to the guardrails that keep the platform coherent as it scales across brands.
• Establish and defend performance budgets and SLOs for the experiences that matter most to readers (load, render, scroll, media, page transitions), and make sure the platform ships to them.
• Own how we measure real reader experience: define the Real User Monitoring (RUM) and Core Web Vitals instrumentation, make sure it captures what actually matters in the field, and turn it into a continuous feedback loop on front‑end and delivery health.
• Establish a governance framework for what reaches the page: surface the cost of third‑party calls and integrations, set clear baselines, and hold the line on what does and does not end up in front of the reader.
• Edge, CDN & Web Delivery Own the architecture of the edge and delivery layer: CDN strategy, caching, and the cloud infrastructure that delivers our brands to a global audience.
• Stay ahead of the delivery landscape: evolving CDN capabilities, edge compute, and the fast‑moving reality of bot and automated traffic, and translate those trends into how we architect for resilience, cost and performance.
• Technical Leadership Raise the technical floor across the organization through design review, pairing, documentation and principled…