Chief AI Officer

washpost; Washington (District of Columbia); On-site; USD 350,000 - 650,000; Full time

Job summary

The Washington Post is seeking a Chief AI Officer to set and lead the company's AI strategy across journalism, engineering, advertising, and subscriptions. Reporting to the CTO, this role unifies AI initiatives into a single roadmap that drives measurable business value while upholding accuracy and trust.

You will build responsible AI governance, guide third‑party models, recruit world‑class AI talent, and partner with newsroom, product, and commercial teams to ship reader‑facing products that

Responsibilities

• Own the company-wide AI strategy and roadmap.
• Lead the design and delivery of reader-facing AI products.
• Define governance, bias mitigation, and risk management for AI initiatives.
• Collaborate with newsroom, engineering, advertising, and subscriptions leaders.
• Build and mentor world-class AI teams while fostering AI fluency.

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-v