Staff Engineer, GraphQL Platform New New York, NY

The New York Times Company; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 162,000 - 195,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, and vision benefits

Company-matching 401(k)

Stock purchase plan

Paid vacation and sick days

Parental leave

Tuition reimbursement and professional

Job summary

The New York Times Company seeks a GraphQL and Developer Experience enthusiast to join our Samizdat team and help scale a mission-critical distributed platform. You will shape GraphQL schema design, governance, and tooling while mentoring others and supporting on-call work.

This hybrid NYC-based role reports to a Senior Software Engineering Manager. With 5+ years in API development and Go experience, you will optimize performance, implement federation concepts, and improve developer workflows.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of software development experience with a focus on API development.
• Expertise developing and scaling GraphQL APIs in production, with federation principles.
• Background includes at least one statically typed backend language (Go).
• Familiar with automation for code quality, release management, and developer workflow improvements.
• Experience delivering projects from design to implementation, testing and documentation.
• Values learning, sharing knowledge, and constructive feedback.

Responsibilities

• Develop new platform offerings with reliability, scalability, and performance.
• Lead schema design and governance, participate in schema working groups, review contributions.
• Contribute to automation, developer tooling, and onboarding guides for adopters and contributors.
• Support on-call, incident response, and platform escalations.
• Mentor team members and promote technical excellence and respectful culture.
• Report to the Senior Software Engineering Manager.

Skills

5+ years software development

GraphQL APIs

Go

Code quality automation

End-to-end project delivery

Mentoring / knowledge sharing

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.
• You will report to the Senior Software Engineering Manager.

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.

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

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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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