Senior Staff Software Engineer, 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 is the AI-powered content platform for media companies. Purpose-built for publishers and broadcasters, it is the CMS and content platform that ambitious media organizations across digital media, news publishing, broadcast, and B2B publishing use to create and distribute content, grow and engage their audiences, and monetize through subscriptions and advertising. Fully leveraging AWS, the platform is built on a microservices architecture, and our teams deploy new features and products daily. Arc XP currently powers more than 1,500 sites in 25 countries that reach more than 1.5 billion unique visitors monthly.

This position sits on the Content Intelligence team, which builds and operates the AI systems that power Arc XP. The team owns the Arc Intelligence API, a multi-tenant LLM and vector platform used across Arc products; Ask the News, which provides retrieval-augmented answers over a publisher's own archive; and the intelligence layer behind our personalization and audience products. These are production systems serving publishers across North America, Europe, Latin America, and APAC. They support a wide range of newsroom, audience, and business workflows, and that breadth shapes how we build: with strong tenant isolation, reliable retrieval, thoughtful controls, and careful attention to cost, performance, and trust at scale.

We are seeking a Senior Staff Software Engineer to lead technical direction across these systems. This is a senior individual contributor role with organizational technical leadership scope. You will define how these systems fit together, write the designs others build against, ship the hardest parts, and ensure the work scales across tenants, content models, languages, and operating requirements.

What Motivates You

You’re motivated by powering journalism that millions of readers around the world rely on. You develop clear, evidence-informed perspectives on quality and outcomes, and explain the reasoning behind them constructively. You believe a feature isn’t finished when it works, but when it is instrumented, observable, and documented well enough for someone else to pick up. You don’t wait for direction. You bring ideas forward, flag issues that deserve attention, and give leadership the input they need to make good decisions. You have a bias for elegance, choosing simplification and consolidation over adding more layers of configuration and logic. You thrive in fast-moving environments with many moving parts, shifting focus between priorities as the day unfolds.

How You’ll Support the Mission

Platform Architecture: Own the 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, including solution design, security review, incremental rollout, and deprecation of what it replaced.

Set technical direction that holds across the organization, keeping decisions coherent with the services we depend on.

AI Quality and Evaluation: Own and evolve the evaluation infrastructure, keeping shared metrics reliable, relevant, and aligned with evolving quality needs. Lead the safe adoption of new models through staged rollout practices, quality checks, and clear recovery paths. Define and maintain AI guardrails that protect users, tenants, and platform reliability while keeping model capabilities aligned with product needs.

Multi‑Tenancy, Security, and Privacy: Own the multi‑tenancy model and enforce tenant isolation in all new development. Partner with Security to strengthen privacy‑by‑default practices, with clear standards for data retention, minimization, erasure, and compliance controls. Partner with Security on threat modeling, secure design reviews, and prioritizing vulnerability remediation.

Production Ownership and Delivery: Own the release train from customer test environments to production across regions, hotfixes included, without needing someone else to decide when it is safe to ship. Participate in the on‑call rotation. Define and track key metrics for system health, customer activity, and business‑critical workflows. Partner with operations and customer enablement to streamline customer setup and onboarding.

Technical Leadership and Product Ownership: Drive what gets built. Bring ideas forward, shape the roadmap for your product area, and advocate for priorities with product and engineering leadership. Lead mob programming sessions, design reviews, and architecture discussions, using them to raise engineering standards rather than simply approving changes. Mentor and unblock other engineers through hands‑on collaboration and design partnership.

The Skills and Experience You Bring

Minimum Qualifications 8+ years designing, building, and operating backend distributed systems at scale, including significant experience setting technical direction at the senior, staff, or principal level. Demonstrated ability to lead and architect across teams, influence technical direction without formal authority, and stay accountable for outcomes that depend on other teams' work. Strong Python experience, including production API development with FastAPI or a close equivalent. Deep AWS experience across core services, including Lambda, ECS, S3, CloudFront, DynamoDB, Bedrock, CodePipeline, and CodeBuild. Experience with infrastructure as code frameworks, including Terraform, OpenTofu, Terragrunt, CloudFormation, or similar. Hands‑on experience building production AI systems: model routing, retrieval architecture, embedding and chunking strategy, reranking, streaming responses, guardrails, and evaluation harnesses. Experience with multi‑tenant SaaS architecture, including tenant isolation enforcement, per‑tenant configuration, and usage metering. Demonstrated written clarity across design documents, roadmaps, and runbooks — much of this role’s leverage is text. We weigh practical equivalent experience equally and do not require a formal degree.

Preferred Qualifications Production‑scale experience with vector embeddings, storage, and retrieval.

Familiarity with workflow orchestration frameworks, such as Temporal.

Familiarity with event streaming platforms, such as Kafka.

Experience with NoSQL and document databases, such as MongoDB Atlas.

Experience implementing observability with Datadog or comparable tooling, including APM, LLM observability, and application security monitoring.

Experience evaluating and integrating multiple model providers and hosting options.

Strong API and developer‑experience craft: OpenAPI discipline, versioning, deprecation paths, backward compatibility, and predictable usage contracts.

Comfortable leveraging AI‑assisted development tools, such as Claude Code, across prototyping, implementation, testing, and documentation while applying strong engineering judgment.

Experience evolving large‑scale production systems while maintaining customer continuity across multiple languages or regions.

Media, publishing, or newsroom technology background.

Experience developing streaming media or rich content delivery workflows.

Hands‑on experience with multimodal AI tools for media analysis and generation, including video, photo, or audio.

Compensation and Benefits

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 program

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: $144,600 - $241,100 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.

The Post strives to provide its readers with high‑quality, trustworthy news and information while constantly innovating. That mission is best served by a diverse, multi‑generational workforce with varied life experiences and perspectives. All cultures and backgrounds are welcomed.

Arc XP (www.arcxp.com) is a cloud-based digital experience platform that helps enterprise companies, retail brands and media and entertainment organizations create and distribute content, drive digital commerce, and deliver powerful multichannel experiences. A division of The Washington Post, Arc XP has powered the digital transformation of customers across the globe, currently serving more than 1,500 sites in 25+ countries that reach more than 1.5 billion unique visitors monthly.