Senior Full-Stack Software Engineer, Games – Web Platform

📋 Job Overview

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 New York Times

The New York Times is looking for a Senior Full-Stack Engineer to join the Games Web Platform squad. You'll help shape the platform behind The Times' suite of games, building the capabilities that help our teams to deliver engaging, reliable experiences for players. You'll take ownership of complex engineering work across our application, and help the team turn new puzzle ideas into scalable product capabilities.

🎯 The Role

You'll strengthen the technology behind our existing games and help create the foundation for new experiences. Working with engineers, designers, product managers, and production partners, you'll guide technical decisions from discovery through launch, balancing a high-quality player experience with maintainable, reliable systems. You'll also share your expertise through mentorship, thoughtful technical reviews, and contributions to an engineering organization that values transparency, diversity, learning, and a community of practice.

Our team builds web applications with React, semantic HTML, and SCSS, prioritizing accessibility and performance in the player experience. You'll contribute across the stack: shaping front-end architectures and shared platform capabilities, and designing and building performant Go APIs that support the Games ecosystem. Our infrastructure runs on Amazon Web Services, with Fastly providing edge delivery and caching. We're looking for someone who can make sound architectural tradeoffs, improve the systems they work on, and help other engineers deliver high-quality work.

You will report to the Engineering Manager, Platform squad.

This is a hybrid role based at our New York City headquarters. You can typically expect to come into the office 2-3+ days/week.

✅ Key Responsibilities

• Lead the design and evolution of foundational web platform capabilities and shared component libraries, helping Games teams deliver reliable, accessible, high-quality experiences.
• Lead the design and operation of performant, scalable Go APIs and services that support the evolving needs of the Games ecosystem.
• Partner with Product, Design, and Production on complex projects. Shape technical approaches, weigh tradeoffs, and turn creative concepts into reliable product capabilities.
• Improve performance, accessibility, and reliability across the Games suite, applying modern front-end practices and edge delivery capabilities to create a great player experience.
• Improve developer experience by building and evolving tools, including Claude Code tooling, that help engineering teams deliver high-quality software.
• Provide technical leadership through architecture and code reviews, clear engineering standards, and mentorship that helps teammates grow and teams deliver.
• Strengthen production quality by using appropriate testing, monitoring, and operational practices to identify and address issues in the systems you own.
• 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.

📌 Required Qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering experience building, deploying, and operating high-traffic web applications and distributed systems
• Lead complex engineering work from design through production, making sound technical tradeoffs and partnering across Product, Design, and Editorial to build maintainable solutions
• Build accessible, performant web experiences with modern JavaScript (ES6+), semantic HTML, CSS/SCSS, and React or a similar framework
• Design shared component libraries or platform capabilities used by multiple teams, with attention to API design, documentation, adoption, and long-term support
• Build performant, scalable APIs and services using Go, Java, or Python
• Deploy and operate production services in cloud environments such as Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud Platform, using technologies such as databases, Redis, Docker, and CDNs or edge platforms like Fastly
• Strengthen production quality and reliability through testing, monitoring, and observability; contribute technical leadership through design and code reviews, sound technical decisions, mentorship, and knowledge-sharing

⭐ Desirable Experience

• Prior engineering experience in the gaming industry with web-based games, puzzles, or interactive media
• Demonstrated interest in mission-driven engineering and a desire to partner with an accomplished team to support the journalistic independence of The New York Times
• Experience with CI/CD automation (e.g., GitHub Actions, Drone, or Terraform) and a \"DevOps\" approach to platform stability
• Familiarity with monitoring and observability tools (e.g., Datadog, Sentry, or Grafana) to improve the player experience
• A \"product-first\" mindset, with an obsession for end-user satisfaction and editorial efficiency
• A growth-oriented mindset: You embrace technical challenges, learn from mistakes, and are eager to share your findings to help the whole team level up

🎁 Benefits

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: $140,000 - $160,000 USD

🛂 Visa & Eligibility

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.