$140,000 – $160,000
Listed on The New York Times Company’s own careers site. You apply with them directly — we never stand between you and the employer.
What this role is
This role builds backend systems and APIs powering NYT Cooking's recipe features, including AI-driven personalization and search, serving millions of users across web and mobile platforms. It suits experienced backend engineers comfortable with distributed systems, GraphQL, and cloud infrastructure who want to work on a consumer product at scale.
Our summary, not The New York Times Company’s wording. The full posting is on their site.
Skills this role names
- Amazon Web Services (AWS)
- Datadog
- Docker
- Elasticsearch
- GitHub Actions
- Go
- GraphQL
- Java
- Kubernetes
- PostgreSQL
- Retrofit (REST)
- Ruby
- Sentry
- Terraform
- TypeScript
Log in to see which of these are already on your profile.
What they ask for
Required
- 5+ years designing and implementing scalable APIs and backend services using GraphQL and REST
- 5+ years developing backend systems in Go, Ruby, TypeScript, or Java
- 5+ years working with SQL databases, particularly PostgreSQL, including data modeling and query optimization
- 3+ years with distributed systems and search technologies like Elasticsearch or OpenSearch
- 3+ years with cloud infrastructure platforms like AWS or GCP and containerized deployment with Docker and Kubernetes
- Experience leading projects through full software development lifecycle and mentoring engineers
Nice to have
- Experience with GraphQL federation and building scalable subgraphs
- Experience with search and recommendation technologies, Elasticsearch relevance tuning, and ML/LLM-driven features
- Strong experience with Go and/or Ruby on Rails for API-driven services
- Experience with infrastructure tooling including Terraform, CI/CD pipelines, and LLM evaluation tools like Braintrust