Senior LLM Engineer, R&D New New York, NY

The New York Times Company; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 110,000 - 124,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health benefits

FSA

401(k)

Employee stock purchase plan

Paid vacation

Paid sick leave

Parental leave

Tuition reimbursement

Professional development

Job summary

The New York Times Company is seeking a Senior Software Engineer with a focus on applied AI to design and build LLM-backed applications that align with our journalistic mission.

You will report to the Executive Director of R&D and contribute to reliable, scalable AI-powered services.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional software development or equivalent experience.
• Professional experience architecting and shipping applications that use LLMs. Experience with multi-step chaining and human-in-the-loop workflows.
• Strong understanding of LLM evaluations. Experience refining products using instrumentation, monitoring, and golden datasets to ensure accuracy and robustness.
• Experience in algorithmic and AI text processing (e.g. text segmentation, semantic chunking, restructuring).

Responsibilities

• Design and implement LLM-backed APIs – driving improvements to reach target outcomes through evaluation, grounding and fine-tuning best practices.
• Deploy reliable services within cloud environments (such as GCP or AWS) to support high-traffic LLM applications.
• Manage the transition of features from experimental prototypes to stable production systems in a fast-paced environment with evolving requirements.
• Collaborate with designers, product managers and stakeholders to translate detailed requirements into technical tasks, providing accurate estimates and progress updates.
• Maintain comprehensive documentation to facilitate feature handoff and future maintenance.
• Stay at the forefront of the evolving AI and LLM landscape, identifying and advocating for the use of new technologies and best practices.
• Demonstrate understanding of our value of journalistic independence and a commitment to our mission to seek the truth and help people understand the world.

Skills

LLM apps

Multi-step workflows

Human-in-the-loop

LLM evaluation

Text processing

Tools

GCP

AWS

Dagster

Braintrust

Job description

The mission of The New York Times is to seek the truth and help people understand the world. That means independent journalism is at the heart of all we do as a company. It’s why we have a world-renowned newsroom that sends journalists to report on the ground from nearly 160 countries. It’s why we focus deeply on how our readers will experience our journalism, from print to audio to a world-class digital and app destination. And it’s why our business strategy centers on making journalism so good that it’s worth paying for.

About Us:

Research & Development at The New York Times explores how emerging technologies can be applied in service of journalism. We collaborate with designers, developers, reporters, photographers and editors to bring new forms of storytelling to life, from prototyping to publishing.

At The Times, technology permeates every aspect of our business, from our thought-provoking coverage of technological trends to the digital-first transformation of our own business to the changing world of our readers. The Research & Development team explores the new opportunities that emerging technologies may provide the New York Times and our commercial and strategic goals.

We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer with a background in applied AI to develop applications using Large Language Models (LLMs) in service of The Times mission and journalistic standards.

You will report to the Executive Director of R&D.

Responsibilities:

• Design and implement LLM-backed APIs – driving improvements to reach target outcomes through evaluation, grounding and fine-tuning best practices.
• Deploy reliable services within cloud environments (such as GCP or AWS) to support high-traffic LLM applications.
• Manage the transition of features from experimental prototypes to stable production systems in a fast-paced environment with evolving requirements.
• Collaborate with designers, product managers and stakeholders to translate detailed requirements into technical tasks, providing accurate estimates and progress updates.
• Maintain comprehensive documentation to facilitate feature handoff and future maintenance.
• Stay at the forefront of the evolving AI and LLM landscape, identifying and advocating for the use of new technologies and best practices.
• Demonstrate understanding of our value of journalistic independence and a commitment to our mission to seek the truth and help people understand the world.

Basic Qualifications:

You are comfortable building projects by yourself and enjoy collaboration with a larger team. You are both curious about and skeptical of new technologies. You're excited to apply new tools, but aim to do so in service of solving important problems and making a difference for users. You take pride in your craft and understand the need to capture patterns and support future development.

• 5+ years of professional software development or equivalent experience.
• Professional experience architecting and shipping applications that use LLMs. Experience with multi-step chaining and human-in-the-loop workflows.
• Strong understanding of LLM evaluations. Experience refining products using instrumentation, monitoring, and golden datasets to ensure accuracy and robustness.
• Experience in algorithmic and AI text processing (e.g. text segmentation, semantic chunking, restructuring).

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience building reliable, scalable back-end services in cloud environments (e.g. GCP, AWS).
• Familiarity with AI orchestration and evaluation frameworks (e.g. AWS Step Functions, Google Cloud Workflows, Dagster, Braintrust).
• Experience building front-end user interfaces for LLM-backed products.

This is a temporary position that is expected to last through November 2027.

#LI-Hybrid

Additional Compensation and Benefits:

For roles in the U.S., dependent on your role, you may be eligible for variable pay, such as an annual bonus and restricted stock.

• medical, dental and vision benefits
• Flexible Spending Accounts (F.S.A.s)
• a company-matching 401(k) plan
• employee stock purchase plan
• paid vacation
• paid sick days
• paid parental leave
• tuition reimbursement
• professional development programs

For roles outside of the U.S., information on benefits will be provided during the interview process

The hourly rate of base pay for this role is:

$79.67 - $90.11 USD

Candidate Use of GenAI Tools:

We’re excited to learn more about you and your experience. To keep our hiring process as fair and authentic as possible, we ask that you submit your own work and not use GenAI tools to generate substantive content during the application and interview process.

If you’re an engineering candidate, we’ll let you know what specific GenAI tools you are permitted to use for your technical assessment.

The New York Times Company is committed to being the world’s best source of independent, reliable and quality journalism. To do so, we embrace a diverse workforce that has a broad range of backgrounds and experiences across our ranks, at all levels of the organization. We encourage people from all backgrounds to apply.

We are an Equal Opportunity Employer and do not discriminate on the basis of an individual's sex, age, race, color, creed, national origin, alienage, religion, marital status, pregnancy, sexual orientation or affectional preference, gender identity and expression, disability, genetic trait or predisposition, carrier status, citizenship, veteran or military status and other personal characteristics protected by law. All applications will receive consideration for employment without regard to legally protected characteristics. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC)’s Know Your Rights Poster is available here .

The New York Times Company will provide reasonable accommodations as required by applicable federal, state, and/or local laws. Individuals seeking an accommodation for the application or interview process should email [e-mail]. Emails sent for unrelated issues, such as following up on an application, will not receive a response.

Voluntary Disclosures & Self Identify Questions

Individuals seeking employment are considered without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex, marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, veteran status, or sexual orientation. To ensure compliance with equal employment opportunity requirements, we invite you to complete the Voluntary Disclosure form below. All applications will receive consideration for employment without regard to legally protected characteristics. Whether you decide to disclose or not, it will not be considered in the hiring process or thereafter. Any information that you do provide will be recorded and maintained in a confidential file.

Voluntary Self-Identification

For government reporting purposes, we ask candidates to respond to the below self-identification survey.Completion of the form is entirely voluntary. Whatever your decision, it will not be considered in the hiringprocess or thereafter. Any information that you do provide will be recorded and maintained in aconfidential file.

As set forth in The New York Times’s Equal Employment Opportunity policy,we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.

If you believe you belong to any of the categories of protected veterans listed below, please indicate by making the appropriate selection.As a government contractor subject to the Vietnam Era Veterans Readjustment Assistance Act (VEVRAA), we request this information in order to measurethe effectiveness of the outreach and positive recruitment efforts we undertake pursuant to VEVRAA. Classification of protected categoriesis as follows:

A "disabled veteran" is one of the following: a veteran of the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service who is entitled to compensation (or who but for the receipt of military retired pay would be entitled to compensation) under laws administered by the Secretary of Veterans Affairs; or a person who was discharged or released from active duty because of a service-connected disability.

A "recently separated veteran" means any veteran during the three-year period beginning on the date of such veteran's discharge or release from active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval, or air service.

An "active duty wartime or campaign badge veteran" means a veteran who served on active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service during a war, or in a campaign or expedition for which a campaign badge has been authorized under the laws administered by the Department of Defense.

An "Armed forces service medal veteran" means a veteran who, while serving on active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service, participated in a United States military operation for which an Armed Forces service medal was awarded pursuant to Executive Order 12985.