Software Engineer, Games - Web Platform , NY

Overview

The mission of The New York Times is to seek the truth and help people understand the world. Independent journalism is at the heart of all we do. Our newsroom reports from nearly 160 countries and we focus on how readers experience our journalism across print, audio, digital, and apps. 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 will be part of a foundational squad of engineers, designers, and product managers to help create immersive gaming experiences across The New York Times’ suite of games. You will build infrastructure and new puzzle capabilities that power our content and maintain internal editorial tools that enable puzzle creators to excel.

Your work will expand and strengthen the technology behind existing games while enabling new experiences. As a member of the platform group, you will bridge creative vision with technical solutions, collaborating with Product, Design, and Production. We value transparency, diversity, learning, and a community of practice.

We build our web applications in React, using accessible, semantic HTML and SCSS to provide a high‑quality, inclusive experience. You will focus on front‑end architectures for games and editorial tools, and you will develop performant Go APIs that serve our gaming ecosystem. Our infrastructure is hosted on AWS, with Redis for caching and Fastly for edge delivery.

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

• Develop the foundational web infrastructure and shared component libraries to help engineering teams 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 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Experience writing performant server‑side code;
  Go is used here, but experience with Java or Python is applicable.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure and content delivery, including AWS (or GCP), Redis, databases, Docker, and Edge computing/CDNs like Fastly.
• A collaborative, product‑oriented mindset with experience working with Product, Design, and Editorial teams to build new puzzle capabilities.

• Prior engineering experience in the gaming industry with web‑based games, puzzles, or interactive media.
• Interest in mission‑driven engineering and a desire to support journalistic independence of The New York Times.
• Experience with CI/CD automation (e.g., Git Hub Actions, Drone, or Terraform) and a Dev Ops approach to platform stability.
• Familiarity with monitoring/observability tools (Datadog, Sentry, Grafana) to improve the player experience.
• Strong communication skills and a product‑first mindset with a focus on end‑user satisfaction and editorial efficiency.
• A growth‑oriented mindset, willingness to learn from mistakes, and eagerness to share findings with the team.

This role requires limited on‑call hours. An on‑call schedule will be determined on joining,…