Engineering Manager, Messaging Platforms

Engineering Manager, Messaging Platforms

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 New York Times is looking for an Engineering Manager to lead our Messaging & Targeting Pipeline team. This team is at the core of our reader engagement strategy, building and operating the high-throughput systems that power personalized, timely communication to millions of readers across email, push notifications, and other channels.

You will be responsible for the technical vision and execution of a critical data pipeline that enables sophisticated audience segmentation and message targeting. You will partner with leaders in engineering, product, data, and marketing to build a platform that is scalable, reliable, and intelligent. We're looking for a leader who is passionate about building inclusive, high-performing teams and thrives on solving complex technical challenges at scale.

Responsibilities:

• Lead and Develop the Team: Manage a team of backend engineers, fostering their career growth through coaching, mentorship, and continuous feedback. Promote a culture of collaboration, psychological safety, and engineering excellence.
• Drive Technical Strategy: Guide the team in designing, building, and maintaining high-throughput, low-latency pipelines for message targeting, personalization, and delivery. Drive decisions on architecture, technology selection, and operational best practices.
• Execute and Deliver: Collaborate across functions and stakeholders to define roadmaps, plan sprints, and deliver impactful projects. Ensure the team's work is aligned with broader company objectives.
• Ensure Operational Excellence: Own the reliability, scalability, and performance of the team's services. Champion robust monitoring, alerting, and on-call practices to maintain high availability for our critical systems.
• Collaborate Across Boundaries: Build strong relationships and coordinate projects across other teams and organizations to ensure successful outcomes. Represent the team in technical discussions and clearly articulate technical challenges and risks.
• Demonstrate support and understanding of our value of journalistic independence and a strong commitment to our mission to seek the truth and help people understand the world.
• This role reports to the Director of Engineering for Messaging Platforms.

Basic Qualifications:

• 2+ years of experience in an engineering management or people leadership role
• 5+ years of hands-on experience as a software engineer, with a strong background in backend systems
• Proven technical leadership in the delivery of large-scale, complex software projects
• Experience hiring, developing, and retaining software engineers
• Familiarity with cloud-based infrastructure (e.g., GCP, AWS)

Preferred Qualifications:

• Deep experience with event-driven architectures and distributed systems at scale
• Hands-on experience with data processing technologies (e.g., Kafka, Kinesis, Flink, Spark) and building/managing data pipelines
• Experience leading teams that build and operate services for personalization, ad-tech, or marketing automation platforms
• Demonstrated success in leading geographically distributed teams
• Experience working on projects with non-engineering partners (e.g., Data Science, Marketing, Legal, Privacy)

This role may require limited on-call hours. An on-call schedule will be determined when you join, taking into account team size and other variables.