Senior Backend Software Engineer

Join the future of news

We’re on a mission to deliver riveting storytelling for all of America. At The Washington Post, you’ll help reinvent news. Our work is driven by a deep investigative spirit and enhanced by innovation to bring audiences closer to the stories that matter most.

The Washington Post is powered by the passion and talent of our people. It takes all of us to reinvent news. Beyond our award-winning Newsroom and Opinions teams, we work across many departments, including Brand & Events, Communications, Customer Care, Engineering & Product, Finance, Human Resources, Legal, Marketing & Advertising, Print Operations, and Sales.

The Washington Post is seeking a Senior Software Engineer with expertise in personalization, and scalable full-stack solutions to join our Platform Engineering organization. This role is critical in driving growth through the development of AI and personalization features facing end users. As a senior engineer, you will collaborate with cross-functional teams to build and own the platform on top of which AI/ML models are delivered and maintain critical data pipelines that feed product and ML decision-making.

• You are passionate about solving meaningful technical challenges that directly impact user experience.
• You have a curious mindset, always exploring new technologies and approaches.
• You have a passion to write flexible and reusable code.
• You are obsessed with understanding the big picture and how your work fits in.
• You thrive in environments where you have autonomy but also enjoy being part of a supportive team.
• You are energized with learning new technologies and platforms.
• You lean into collaboration to figure out solutions to the toughest problems.
• You have an aptitude to simplify and communicate technical concepts to a non-technical audience.
• You are excited about contributing to AI and personalization projects at scale.
• You are driven by the mission of journalism and want to build impactful software for millions of users.

• Design, build, and maintain full-stack web applications using Python and AWS services.
• Develop and optimize database schemas and queries, primarily using Postgres, to support high-performance data processing.
• Partner with data scientists to integrate and deploy AI models and recommendation systems into production.
• Build and maintain critical data pipelines that feed product and ML decision-making.
• Manage and optimize AWS infrastructure, driving cloud cost mastery and reducing overall spend.
• Participate in technical planning and ownership of end-to-end development efforts from idea to production.
• Provide technical guidance and mentorship to other engineers through code reviews and knowledge sharing.
• Regularly identify technical debt and areas of opportunity in the codebase, organizing team efforts to resolve them.
• Work closely with product managers, designers, and stakeholders to translate business requirements into technical solutions.
• Establish and foster engineering standards for code quality, unit testing, and continuous integration across all systems.
• Execute on ambiguous spikes to deliver clear technical recommendations and proof of concepts.

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related field.
• 7+ years of experience in software development, with a focus on full-stack solutions.
• 1+ years of experience working with AI or personalization-focused features.
• Strong experience with full-stack development using Python and Node.js.
• Proficiency with relational databases such as Postgres and MySQL, including query optimization.
• Hands-on expertise with AWS services such as EC2, Lambda, S3, ECS, and RDS.
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools such as AWS Cloud Formation or Terraform.
• Experience with Dev Ops technologies such as Docker, Jenkins, and CI/CD pipelines.
• Practical experience with monitoring and observability tools like Datadog, Splunk, or Cloud Watch.
• Familiarity with No
  
  SQL solutions like MongoDB or Document DB.
• Experience writing unit and integration tests to ensure code quality.
• Excellent communication,…