Software Engineer, Experimentation & Instrumentation

Software Engineer, Experimentation & Instrumentation

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.

As a Software Engineer on the Experimentation & Instrumentation team, you will build and maintain interfaces and golden paths that make it easy for product teams to instrument experiments and behavioral events and connect experiment outcomes to downstream user behavior and engagement metrics. You will work with Product, Data, and other engineering teams to deliver SDKs and interfaces that connect our products and systems to the data platform, powering data-informed decisions at scale.

This is a hybrid role reporting to the Senior Engineering Manager within the Data Platforms mission.

Responsibilities:

• Build services, SDKs, and interfaces that power experimentation and behavioral event instrumentation across our products.
• Partner with Product, Analytics, and other engineering teams to deliver roadmap work that improves how we run experiments and instrument user behavior data.
• Support the full experimentation and instrumentation stack, from event collection to data modeling and downstream usage, including changes to schemas and contracts.
• Build for reliability and observability, including monitoring, alerting, runbooks, and participation in incident response for the systems you own.
• Create clear documentation, examples, and integration guide that help engineers and partners use our tools.
• Contribute to code and design reviews and pair programming to improve code quality and maintainability across the team.
• 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.

Basic Qualifications:

• 3+ years of professional software engineering experience building backend or full-stack services, data pipelines, or client-side SDKs.
• Proficiency in at least one modern programming language (for example, Java, Go, Python, or JavaScript/TypeScript).
• Experience with standard engineering practices, including automated testing, code review, CI/CD, and operating production systems.
• Familiarity with Agile software development practices.
• Break down complex problems and deploy incremental, high-quality solutions.
• Experience communicating blockers, updates and resolutions to customers and other partners.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience working with data-intensive or event-driven applications, such as logging, analytics, or experimentation systems.
• Experience operating in a dual-cloud environment (GCP/AWS), including running production services in one or both clouds.
• Experience designing or maintaining SDKs or shared libraries used by other engineering teams.
• Experience designing and evolving data schemas or event contracts in collaboration with analysts and product partners.
• Experience with a data warehouse like BigQuery, Snowflake or Redshift.

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