Senior Machine Learning Engineer, A.I. Initiatives

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 a Senior Machine-Learning Engineer to join our team focused on artificial-intelligence initiatives in the newsroom. The team prototypes internal and reader-facing applications of generative A.I. and other machine-learning techniques. Our goal is to develop powerful reporting tools and new forms of journalism for the benefit of our colleagues and our readers, while ensuring that our use of these technologies is always ethical and up to the standards of The Times.

As a member of the team, you will brainstorm, evaluate, and prototype features and products that could improve internal workflows, reporting capabilities, and how The Times is presented to readers. The engineer will be responsible for building applications on top of machine-learning models to produce working prototypes. While expertise in machine learning and large foundational models is the most important technical skill for this role, the job also requires full-stack development experience and prior experience in media.

The job reports to the editorial director for A.I. initiatives. You will also work closely with two machine-learning engineers, a designer and an editor. Together, our team partners with other members in the news, product and technology groups to conduct experiments and take the best ideas from prototypes to production. This role can be based in our New York City headquarters or fully remote in the US for candidates who do not live within a commutable distance of our offices

Responsibilities:

• Build prototypes that use machine-learning techniques for the betterment of The Times news report
• Develop new algorithms, fine-tuning large-language models, and create other infrastructure for the team’s work
• Collaborate with the A.I. team and other desks in the newsroom to assess the value of each prototype and help determine those worth pursuing further
• Stay up-to-date on the latest A.I. research and model development, to help inform the team’s work and spread technical proficiency throughout the organization
• Develop relationships with other technologists in the newsroom and on product teams, to learn from their existing work with A.I.
• 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:

• 4+ years of software-engineering experience
• 2+ years of developing applications with machine-learning models
• Experience in a newsroom or collaborating with journalists or other creative professionals on software development
• Technical proficiency and recent experience working with large-language and transformer models
• Deep knowledge of machine-learning frameworks
• Experience evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of different A.I. models
• Full-stack engineering skills for developing front-end web applications and agents with server-side components

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience fine-tuning machine-learning models at scale
• Advanced degree in computer science, data science, mathematics or a related field

We are looking for inveterate tinkerers, eager to experiment with a new API and share their findings with others. We favor demos over memos, prototypes over concepts, collaboration over silos, and learning over knowing it all. If these values resonate with you, please consider applying regardless of whether you meet all of the qualifications.

In your application, please include at least two links to recent work with relevance to this role. If that’s not possible, please describe two recent projects with similar relevance.

#LI-Remote

REQ-018023

The annual base pay range for this role is between:$140,000—$155,000 USD

The New York Times is committed to a diverse and inclusive workforce, one that reflects the varied global community we serve. Our journalism and the products we build in the service of that journalism greatly benefit from a range of perspectives, which can only come from diversity of all types, across our ranks, at all levels of the organization. Achieving true diversity and inclusion is the right thing to do. It is also the smart thing for our business. So we strongly encourage women, veterans, people with disabilities, people of color and gender nonconforming candidates to apply.

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