Senior Staff AI Platform Architect – Content Intelligence

The Washington Post; United States; On-site; USD 145,000 - 241,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, vision coverage

401(k) with match

Paid vacation and holidays

Parental leave

Job summary

Arc XP, a division of The Washington Post, seeks a Senior Staff Software Engineer to lead the technical direction of its AI-powered content platform used by media organizations. You will own platform architecture, multi-tenant design, and production delivery across regions, languages, and workloads.

You’ll drive platform evolution, mentor engineers, and collaborate with security and product teams to ensure scalable, reliable, and cost-effective AI systems for news publishers worldwide.

Qualifications

• 8+ years designing, building, and operating backend distributed systems at scale.
• Strong Python experience with production API development.
• Deep AWS experience across Lambda, ECS, S3, CloudFront, DynamoDB, Bedrock, CodePipeline, CodeBuild.
• Experience with infrastructure as code: Terraform, OpenTofu, Terragrunt, CloudFormation.
• Hands-on experience building production AI systems: model routing, retrieval, embedding, reranking, guardrails, evaluation harnesses.
• Experience with multi-tenant SaaS architecture and tenant isolation enforcement.
• No formal degree required; practical equivalent experience accepted.
• Experience evolving large-scale production systems across languages or regions.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end design of Arc’s AI platform: model routing, prompt management, vector storage, and agentic runtimes.
• Lead major architectural changes end-to-end with solution design, security review, rollout, and deprecation.
• Set technical direction that holds across the organization.
• Own the AI evaluation infrastructure and guardrails for safety and quality.
• Enforce tenant isolation and privacy-by-default practices with Security partners.
• Own release trains from test environments to production across regions, including hotfixes.
• Mentor engineers and lead architecture discussions to raise engineering standards.

Skills

Python

AWS

Infrastructure as code

Production AI

Multi-tenant SaaS

Technical leadership

Documentation & runbooks

Education

No formal degree required

Tools

FastAPI

Terraform

OpenTofu

Terragrunt

CloudFormation

Datadog

Kafka

MongoDB Atlas

Job description

Arc XP, a division of The Washington Post, seeks a Senior Staff Software Engineer to lead the technical direction of its AI-powered content platform used by media organizations. You will own platform architecture, multi-tenant design, and production delivery across regions, languages, and workloads.

You’ll drive platform evolution, mentor engineers, and collaborate with security and product teams to ensure scalable, reliable, and cost-effective AI systems for news publishers worldwide.