Senior Data Engineer, Customer-Facing Data Products

About the role

This position owns the end-to-end lifecycle for customer-facing data. You will design event-driven pipelines and APIs that convert raw streams into reliable, curated assets. These assets empower partner teams to build experiences rooted in journalism and aligned with our business goals. The role demands deep collaboration with software and infrastructure teams to integrate solutions into production at scale. You will ensure that data reliability and clarity support the journalistic mission of seeking truth and clarifying complex events for the public. The position requires balancing technical excellence with the urgency of real-time information in a newsroom environment. You will act as a steward of data quality, guiding stakeholders to use analytics responsibly and effectively. All solutions must reflect a commitment to journalistic independence and ethical standards in every pipeline decision.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Architect intake pipelines that capture events and enforce strict schemas to ensure downstream reliability for customer-facing analytics.
• Organize both structured and unstructured sources into clearly defined zones that enable broad reuse across the organization while maintaining data integrity.
• Build and scale serving layers capable of handling heavy, customer-facing traffic while maintaining high availability and consistent performance.
• Establish observability and governance mechanisms that make data quality and lineage transparent to stakeholders through clear monitoring and documentation.
• Identify and refactor performance bottlenecks, working closely with engineering partners to ensure production readiness and robust error handling.
• Coach colleagues through pairing, design discussions, and code reviews to elevate overall data craftsmanship and promote best practices across teams.
• Continuously track advancements in streaming frameworks and data-serving technologies, applying relevant innovations to our products and workflows.
• Collaborate with product managers and external partners to define requirements and deliver solutions that meet shared business and editorial objectives.
• Implement data contracts and testing strategies that validate pipeline behavior and prevent regressions in critical customer-facing datasets.
• Evaluate new tools for data cataloging and metadata management to improve discoverability and understanding of internal data assets.
• Partner with infrastructure teams to optimize resource utilization and cost efficiency in cloud environments, particularly within AWS service offerings.
• Translate complex editorial and business questions into structured analytical problems that can be solved using reliable data products.
• Maintain strong documentation for pipelines, APIs, and data models to support onboarding and long-term maintainability.
• Participate in on-call rotations to respond to data incidents and ensure timely resolution with minimal disruption to news consumers.
• Champion the use of version control and CI/CD automation, leveraging GitHub Actions and Drone to streamline deployment and testing.

Requirements

Candidates must bring a minimum of five years of full-time experience shipping real-time solutions using event-driven pipelines and stream-processing frameworks. You should be comfortable operating within cloud-native environments, particularly AWS service offerings and associated tooling. Proficiency in Python is required, along with the ability to design modern data APIs using REST, GraphQL, and gRPC. Experience with version control and CI/CD automation is necessary; GitHub Actions and Drone are central to our current workflows. You must have hands-on experience with streaming stacks, including Apache Kafka, Apache Flink, or Spark Streaming. Strong SQL skills are essential, along with familiarity with modern data platforms for efficient querying and optimization. You should be experienced building data-serving APIs using Python frameworks such as FastAPI or Flask. Collaboration with product managers and external partners to meet shared objectives is a regular part of the role. You must be able to communicate technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders without sacrificing accuracy or depth. A disciplined approach to testing, monitoring, and debugging is expected to maintain high standards of reliability. The ability to manage multiple priorities in a fast-paced news environment while adhering to deadlines is essential.

Nice to have

Experience developing streaming pipelines that serve high-throughput, customer-facing applications is strongly preferred. A demonstrated history of constructing APIs that meet demanding performance requirements will be considered an asset. Familiarity with data visualization tools and dashboarding practices that support editorial decision-making may be advantageous. Understanding of content management systems and how news content is structured will help bridge data and editorial workflows. Experience contributing to open-source data projects or publishing technical blogs about complex data challenges is encouraged.

Practical notes

Details on the official application page should be reviewed carefully to confirm requirements and submission procedures.