Engineering Manager - Community & Reader Engagement

The New York Times; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 152,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

The New York Times is seeking an Engineering Manager to lead our Community team within the News Product mission. This role guides the end-to-end reader engagement experience—comments, conversations and other interactions on web and native apps—while building scalable backend services and internal tools for editors and moderators.

Based in New York City with a hybrid schedule (2 days in office), you will shape the team's technical vision, uphold trust, safety and performance, and partner with

Qualifications

• 2+ years of experience as an Engineering Manager leading high‑functioning engineering teams.
• Experience managing cross‑disciplinary engineers and overseeing mission‑critical production operations for user‑facing systems.
• Prior experience as a senior or staff‑level engineer building and operating backend services and/or native app features in a production environment.
• Experience collaborating with product, design and data partners on roadmap planning and delivery.

Responsibilities

• Lead a cross‑platform team of engineers working across backend services, web and native clients that power comments, conversations and other reader engagement experiences.
• Guide the technical vision and roadmap for expanding Community features beyond traditional comments into new formats and surfaces, in partnership with product, design and newsroom partners.
• Oversee the development of high‑availability backend services alongside the internal tools and UIs that moderators, editors and product teams use to manage reader participation.
• Ensure the reliability, performance and safety of Community systems, including incident response, post‑incident reviews and follow‑up work for highly visible reader experiences.
• Partner with Product, Design and Data counterparts to prioritize investments that balance immediate operational needs (for example, moderation and safety) with longer‑term platform modernization and experimentation.
• Contribute to the broader News Product mission by leading cross‑team technical or cultural programs. You will also represent the Community team in high‑level technical discussions, where you identify risks and make calculated tradeoffs between feature velocity, reader safety, and platform stability.
• Demonstrate support and understanding of our value of journalistic independence and a strong commitment to our mission to seek the truth and help people understand the world.

Skills

Engineering Management

Cross-disciplinary leadership

Production operations oversight

Backend services

Web & native apps

Roadmap planning

Team collaboration

AI-assisted workflows

Moderation pipelines

Trust & Safety domain knowledge

Tools

React

Node.js

Golang

AWS

GCP

Event-driven architectures

Observability tooling

Job description

The New York Times is seeking an Engineering Manager to lead our Community team within the News Product mission. This role guides the end-to-end reader engagement experience—comments, conversations and other interactions on web and native apps—while building scalable backend services and internal tools for editors and moderators.

Based in New York City with a hybrid schedule (2 days in office), you will shape the team's technical vision, uphold trust, safety and performance, and partner with