Staff Engineer, GraphQL Platform

thenewyorktimes; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 162,000 - 195,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, and vision benefits

Flexible Spending Accounts (FSAs)

401(k) company match

Employee stock purchase plan

Paid vacation

Paid sick days

Paid parental leave

Tuition reimbursement

Professional development programs

Job summary

The New York Times seeks a GraphQL and Developer Experience enthusiast to join the Samizdat team in NYC. You will help shape the API layer powering our products and internal systems, focusing on scalable GraphQL APIs and developer tooling.

You will mentor colleagues, contribute to platform governance, and support on-call incidents while upholding our journalistic mission and commitment to quality software.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of software development experience with a focus on API development.
• Experience designing and scaling GraphQL APIs in production, with federation knowledge (Apollo or similar).
• Experience in a statically typed backend language (Go).
• Experience with automation for code quality, release management, and developer workflow improvements.
• Experience delivering projects from design to implementation, testing, and documentation.

Responsibilities

• Develop new platform offerings while ensuring reliability, scalability, and performance of the GraphQL platform.
• Lead governance of GraphQL schema design and participate in platform-wide schema working groups.
• Contribute to platform automation, developer tooling, and onboarding guides for adopters and contributors.
• Support on-call, incident response, and troubleshooting for platform-level escalations.
• Mentor team members, promoting technical excellence and constructive feedback.
• Demonstrate support for journalistic independence and the mission to seek the truth.

Skills

API development

GraphQL

Go

Automation

Team mentoring

Tools

Apollo GraphQL

Kubernetes

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 the Role

The Samizdat team manages the New York Times' GraphQL platform. Our mission is to provide a API layer powering our products and internal systems. We are in an exciting period of modernization, driving scale and reliability as our upstream data complexity grows. We are looking for a GraphQL and Developer Experience enthusiast to join our team and contribute to our mission-critical distributed platform.

Responsibilities

• Develop new platform offerings while ensuring the reliability, scalability, and performance of our GraphQL platform as it continues to grow.
• Lead by example in establishing and enforcing GraphQL schema design and governance best practices, participating in platform-wide schema working groups, and reviewing/mentoring cross-team contributions.
• Contribute to the platform's automation, developer tooling, and onboarding/kick-off guides for service adopters and subgraph contributors.
• Support on-call, incident response, and troubleshooting efforts for platform-level escalations.
• Mentor team members, promoting technical excellence and a culture of respect and constructive feedback.
• Demonstrate support and 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 have 5+ years of software development experience with a focus on API development.
• You have expertise developing and scaling GraphQL APIs in production, with practical knowledge of federation principles (Apollo or similar).
• Your background includes at least one statically typed backend language (we use Go).
• You are familiar with automation for code quality, release management, and developer workflow improvements.
• You have experience delivering projects from design to implementation, testing and documentation.
• You value learning and improvement, sharing knowledge, and welcoming constructive feedback.

Preferred Qualifications

• Background working with Apollo GraphQL (Router, Federation, schema design, plugins/extensions).
• Knowledge of performance optimization for APIs under high traffic, CDN integration, caching, and multi-region operations.
• Experience troubleshooting and improving observability for a platform distributed across multiple systems.
• Experience deploying and maintaining applications on Kubernetes.

Hybrid Work Details

This is a hybrid role based in our NYC headquarters. You could typically expect to come in the office two days per week.

#LI-Hybrid

REQ-020886

Compensation and Benefits For This Role

In addition to base salary, this role is also eligible for variable pay, such as an annual bonus and restricted stock. Benefits include 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 and professional development programs.

The annual base pay range for this role is between:

$162,000 - $195,000 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.

Equal Opportunity Employment

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 Ti