Chief AI Officer

The Washington Post; Washington (District of Columbia); On-site; USD 282,000 - 470,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental & vision

Pension & 401(k) match

Vacation & paid leave

Paid holidays

Parental leave

Mental health resources

Job summary

The Washington Post is looking for a Chief AI Officer, reporting to the CTO, to set and drive the AI strategy across newsroom, engineering, advertising, and subscriptions. You will unify AI efforts into one roadmap, ensuring products are accurate, trustworthy, and reader-focused.

Lead and grow world-class AI teams, partner with editorial, product, and legal teams, and define governance, data rights, and guardrails. This on-site role offers competitive compensation and benefits.

Qualifications

• A track record of shipping AI products that reach real users with accuracy and reliability.
• Public-facing AI products that avoid hallucinations and retractions.
• Deep, hands-on generative AI experience.
• Knowledge of modern language models, retrieval systems, fine-tuning, and evaluation.

Responsibilities

• Own the company-wide AI strategy and roadmap; ship reader-facing AI products across businesses.
• Collaborate with newsroom leadership, product, engineering, and commercialization teams to drive measurable value.
• Define approach to foundation models, fine-tuning, retrieval infrastructure, and proprietary capabilities while balancing cost andControl.
• Guarantee accuracy and eliminate hallucination; establish evaluation frameworks and guardrails.
• Partner across the company to translate dense technical requirements into business outcomes.
• Set responsible AI governance, data rights, bias mitigation, and risk management standards.
• Build and lead world-class AI talent and foster AI fluency across the organization.

Skills

AI product shipping

Public-facing AI

Generative AI experience

Language models & retrieval

Translate requirements to value

In-house AI capability

Executive leadership

Accuracy & truth

Tech communication

Media experience

AI governance

Research & product

Job description

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.

About Our Team

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.

Why This Role Matters

The Washington Post is looking for a Chief AI Officer, reporting to the CTO, to set and drive the AI strategy for the entire company. This is a rare mandate. It spans the newsroom, engineering, advertising, and subscriptions, and it treats AI not as a cost-cutting tool but as a way to build the products that will define the next era of news. We have been building in this space for years. Ask The Post AI answers reader questions using only our published reporting. Climate Answers and Conversations extend that approach into new formats. On the commercial side, tools like DealXP put AI directly into the hands of our sales teams. The Chief AI Officer will unify these efforts under one strategy, raise the technical bar across all of them, and decide where we go next. This person owns the AI roadmap for the company and builds it in genuine partnership with the leaders who run each business. They translate dense technical possibility into value the business can measure, and they hold the line on the thing that matters most to a news organization: the truth. Products that ship under this leader are accurate, grounded, and trustworthy. A reader-facing feature that hallucinates is not a shipping candidate.

What Motivates You

You are driven to shape how AI transforms journalism, engineering, advertising, and subscriptions through products that create measurable business value. You are passionate about building reader-facing AI products that expand what journalism can do rather than focusing solely on operational efficiency. You are committed to building AI capabilities thoughtfully, making deliberate decisions about when to build, fine-tune, or leverage third-party models. You believe accuracy, truth, and trust are non-negotiable and treat factual errors as unacceptable. You enjoy translating complex technical concepts into business value and influencing leaders across editorial, engineering, and commercial organizations. You are motivated to build high-performing AI teams while fostering AI fluency across the organization. You are excited to define responsible AI governance, standards, and best practices for a leading news organization.

How You'll Support the Mission

Own the company-wide AI strategy and roadmap. Define where AI creates the most value across journalism, engineering, advertising, and subscriptions, sequence the work, and hold the roadmap accountable to real outcomes alongside the business leaders who own each area. Ship reader-facing products, not just internal efficiency. Lead the design and delivery of AI products that readers, advertisers, and subscribers touch directly, creating new products that grow the business and expand what journalism can do. Build, do not just buy. Define the company's approach to leveraging third-party foundation models, fine-tuning, retrieval infrastructure, and proprietary capabilities while making deliberate decisions across cost, control, latency, data rights, and defensibility. Guarantee accuracy and eliminate hallucination in what we ship. Establish the evaluation frameworks, retrieval grounding, human review, and guardrails that make AI products dependable, define a clear standard for what is publishable, and uphold accountability for the accuracy and trustworthiness of everything we ship. Partner across the whole company. Work directly with newsroom leadership, product, engineering, commercial, subscription, standards, and legal teams to earn the trust of the newsroom while delivering AI tools that create measurable value and help commercial teams move revenue. Parse dense technical requirements into business value. Move fluently between model architecture discussions and P&L conversations, separating meaningful technical advances from hype and translating emerging AI capabilities into measurable business value. Set the standards, governance, and red lines. Define responsible AI governance, data rights, bias mitigation, risk management, and organizational standards in partnership with newsroom and standards leaders. Build the team and the culture. Recruit, develop, and lead world-class AI talent while fostering AI fluency and responsible AI adoption throughout the organization. Establish a unified AI roadmap and evaluation practice that the company trusts, balancing build-versus-buy decisions while delivering reader-facing and commercial AI products that meet The Washington Post's standards for quality, accuracy, and long-term business impact.

The Skills and Experience You Bring

• A strong track record of shipping AI products that reached real users and worked, with accuracy and reliability you can speak to concretely.
• Public-facing products that did not hallucinate their way into retractions.
• Deep, hands-on generative AI experience.
• You understand how modern language models, retrieval systems, fine-tuning, and evaluation actually work, and you can engage with the technical detail rather than manage from a distance.
• The ability to read dense technical requirements and research and translate them into product and business value.
• Experience building AI capability in-house, not only assembling vendor tools.
• You know when each approach is right.
• Executive-level judgment and the ability to lead through influence across editorial, engineering, and commercial teams with very different cultures and incentives.
• A genuine commitment to accuracy and truth, and the instinct to treat a factual error as unacceptable rather than an acceptable model limitation.
• Strong communication skills, including the ability to explain hard technical tradeoffs to non-technical leaders and to earn the trust of a skeptical newsroom.
• Experience in media, publishing, or another domain where trust and accuracy are the core of the product.
• A background that spans research and applied product work.
• Experience standing up AI governance and evaluation practices from scratch.

Collaboration makes us stronger. That’s why our offices are designed with open layouts, modern technology, and easy access to transportation. With certain exceptions for newsgathering and business travel, we work on-site five days a week.

Compensation and Benefits

Wherever you are in your life or career, The Washington Post offers comprehensive and inclusive benefits for every step of your journey:

• Competitive medical, dental and vision coverage
• Company-paid pension and 401(k) match
• Three weeks of vacation and up to three weeks of paid sick leave
• Nine paid holidays and two personal days
• 20 weeks paid parental leave for any new parent
• Robust mental health resources
• Backup care and caregiver concierge services
• Gender affirming services
• Pet insurance
• Free Post digital subscription
• Leadership and career development programs

Benefits may vary based on the job, full-time or part-time schedule, location, and collectively bargained status.

The salary range for this position is: $281,850 - $469,750 Annual

The actual salary within this range will depend on individual skills, experience, and qualifications as they relate to specific job requirements.

This position may be eligible for a bonus or incentive program, and a member of the Talent Acquisition team will discuss bonus payment terms and conditions during the interview process.

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. We are powered by the passion and talent of our people. It takes all of us. Join the future of news. Your story awaits.