Backend Engineer for AI Platforms & RAG Pipelines

The New York Times; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 110,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

The New York Times is seeking a Software Engineer for AI Platforms and Products to help build our backend AI platform. This hybrid role is based in New York City, with in-office expectations two days per week.

You will design, implement, and maintain scalable backend services, APIs, and data pipelines, collaborating across editorial, product, ML, and data teams to enable AI-driven journalism and business solutions.

Qualifications

• 2+ years of software engineering experience with backend focus.
• 2+ years with Python or Go.
• Experience building and operating APIs in production.
• Exposure to LLMs or related ecosystem (orchestration, retrieval-augmented generation).

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain scalable backend services and APIs for a central AI platform.
• Develop vector database and retrieval infrastructure for AI-powered discovery experiences.
• Create and manage RAG pipelines and agentic workflows connecting content, data, and models.
• Write high-quality, well-tested backend code with a focus on security and observability.
• Collaborate with editorial, product, ML, and data teams to translate requirements into platform capabilities.

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Terraform

CloudFormation

GCP

AWS

Kafka

Pub/Sub

GraphQL

Job description

The New York Times is seeking a Software Engineer for AI Platforms and Products to help build our backend AI platform. This hybrid role is based in New York City, with in-office expectations two days per week.

You will design, implement, and maintain scalable backend services, APIs, and data pipelines, collaborating across editorial, product, ML, and data teams to enable AI-driven journalism and business solutions.