Software Engineer, Games - Web Platform

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 , Mission Or Department Overview

The New York Times is looking for a Web Platform Engineer with full-stack skills to join the Web Platform squad within the Games team. You'll join a foundational squad of engineers, designers, and product managers to help create incredible, immersive gaming experiences across The New York Time's suite of unique games. You'll be at the heart of the Games mission. You'll build the infrastructure and new puzzle capabilities that power our world-class content.

Additionally, you'll maintain the internal editorial tools that allow our puzzle creators to excel.

Your work will expand and strengthen the technology behind our existing games while allowing the launch of new experiences. As a member of the platform group, you will bridge the gap between and creative vision, collaborating with partners in Product, Design, and Production. You'll be part of an engineering organization that values transparency, diversity, learning, and building a community of practice.

We build our web applications in React, using accessible, semantic HTML and SCSS to provide a high-quality, inclusive experience for all players. As a web platform engineer, you will focus on creating front-end architectures that power our games and editorial tools. You will also develop the performant APIs and endpoints in Go that serve as the backbone for our gaming ecosystem.

We host our infrastructure primarily on AWS, using Redis for caching and Fastly for edge delivery.

This is a hybrid role based in our New York City headquarters.

Responsibilities

• Develop the foundational web infrastructure and shared component libraries that help engineering teams to ship high-quality gaming experiences.
• Develop new puzzle capabilities and features for the internal editorial platform, empowering content creators to build immersive new games.
• Build performant, scalable APIs in Go to support the evolving needs of the Games ecosystem.
• Collaborate with partners in Product, Design, and Production to translate creative visions into technical solutions.
• Optimize web performance and accessibility across the Games suite, using edge computing and modern front-end best practices to provide a world-class player experience.
• Champion technical excellence by participating in code reviews, defining best practices, and contributing to the engineering community of practice.
• 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 Engineering Manager, Web Platform squad.

• 2+ years of professional software engineering experience building, deploying, and maintaining features within high-traffic, large-scale distributed systems.
• Proficiency in front-end fundamentals, including modern JavaScript (ES6+), semantic HTML, and CSS/SCSS, with a focus on web performance and accessibility.
• Professional experience with React (or a similar modern framework) for building complex, scalable web applications and internal tools.
• Experience building shared component libraries that multiple engineering teams consume to guide UI consistency and developer velocity across an organization, which they designed.
• Experience writing performant server-side code; while we use Go, experience with Java or Python is applicable.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure and content delivery, including AWS (or GCP), Redis, databases, containerized environments (Docker), and Edge computing/CDNs like Fastly.
• A collaborative, product-oriented mindset with experience working with partners like Product, Design, and…