Staff Engineer, GraphQL 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 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.

🎯 The Role

We are looking for a GraphQL and Developer Experience enthusiast to join our team and contribute to our mission-critical distributed platform.

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

📌 Required 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.

⭐ Desirable Experience

• 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.

🎁 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.

🛂 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.

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 [email protected].