AI Newsroom Engineer & Tools Lead

Houston Chronicle; Houston (TX); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Houston Chronicle is seeking an AI Newsroom Developer to own hands‑on integration of AI into content products, newsroom tools, and workflows. You will collaborate with reporters and editors to identify high‑impact opportunities to make journalism more personal, efficient, and accessible while upholding newsroom AI standards.

The role combines technical know‑how with journalistic judgment, expects initiative, and centers collaboration across the newsroom, under the Senior Director of Innovation &

Qualifications

• Demonstrated experience with large language models and automatic speech recognition models, and expertise in prompt engineering.
• Experience building agentic systems beyond a simple chat interface.
• Familiarity with newsroom AI apps for transcription, summarization and translation.
• Technical literacy to work with APIs, structured data, or scripting languages (Python, JavaScript).
• Excellent communication and training skills; able to translate technical concepts for nontechnical colleagues.
• Ability to self‑manage and prioritize multiple projects with tight deadlines.
• Commitment to ethical journalism, transparency, and accuracy.

Responsibilities

• Newsroom Integration: Leverage AI in building utility products for consumers.
• Newsroom Integration: Build, evaluate, pilot and integrate generative AI and automation tools, including skills and agents, into the newsroom.
• Newsroom Integration: Lead training sessions and provide support for editors and reporters using AI tools.
• Engineering and development: Identify opportunities where AI can augment journalism (data collection, transcription, summarization, civic coverage, audience personalization).
• Engineering and development: Engineer reliable prompts and system instructions; evaluate and fine‑tune outputs for accuracy, fairness, and clarity.
• Engineering and development: Collaborate with product and engineering teams on internal tools to improve efficiency and enhance storytelling.
• Oversight: Ensure AI applications align with ethical journalism standards and company AI policies.
• Oversight: Establish guardrails for accuracy, sourcing, transparency, and human oversight of AI‑assisted content.
• Oversight: Audit and monitor newsroom AI use, providing regular updates to editorial leadership.
• Collaboration: Serve as a point person for AI use across the newsroom.
• Collaboration: Partner with editorial leads to identify reporting beats where AI‑assisted workflows can expand coverage (e.g., civic meeting monitoring, data‑heavy investigations).

Skills

Large language models

Automatic speech recognition

Prompt engineering

Agentic systems

Transcription tools

Summarization

Translation

APIs & scripting

Python

JavaScript

Communication & training

Project management

Ethical journalism

Tools

APIs

Structured data

Job description

Houston Chronicle is seeking an AI Newsroom Developer to own hands‑on integration of AI into content products, newsroom tools, and workflows. You will collaborate with reporters and editors to identify high‑impact opportunities to make journalism more personal, efficient, and accessible while upholding newsroom AI standards.

The role combines technical know‑how with journalistic judgment, expects initiative, and centers collaboration across the newsroom, under the Senior Director of Innovation &