Senior Engineer, Ecosystems – Vox Media / VoxMedia / Vox

2% 1-Year Employee Growth Rate | 10% 2-Year Employee Growth Rate | LinkedIn | $307.6M Venture Funding

What Is Employee Growth Rate & Why Is It Important?

As the leading independent modern media company, Vox Media ignites conversations and influences culture. Across digital, podcasts, TV, streaming, live events, and print, we tell stories that affect our audience’s daily lives and entertain as much as they inform.

Our portfolio features influential and respected editorial properties including Vox, New York Magazine, The Verge, The Cut, Eater, Vulture, The Strategist, Polygon, SB Nation, Intelligencer, Curbed, Grub Street, and Recode. Off-platform, the Vox Media Podcast Network offers one of the largest collections of popular podcasts, and Vox Media Studios produces and distributes the award-winning nonfiction shows. Powered by innovative technology that scales quality, the Chorus publishing platform and Concert advertising marketplace answer the always-changing needs of modern audiences, creators and marketers.

Vox Media has been named one of Fast Company’s “Most Innovative Companies in Media,” an Inc. “Company of the Year,” Digiday’s “Best Company for Parents,” and one of the Best Places to Work for LGBTQ Equality by the Human Rights Campaign.

About the team:

The Publishing Platforms group is the engineering foundation that powers our world-changing journalism via unique and efficient platforms and tools including storytelling, audience, community, and APIs.

The Ecosystem team builds and supports the core APIs and services for the Publishing Platform. We make data and functionality available across our ecosystem to provide leverage for the rest of the Publishing Platforms teams. We tackle cross-cutting concerns such as authentication, authorization, story publishing and content management. Examples of projects the team has owned include:

• Single GraphQL API schema from multiple underlying GraphQL services to power editorial tools, headless CMS customers and mobile applications.
• Serverless event bus to broadcast changes to key objects (e.g. story published) to make it easier for internal engineers and external customer engineers to  build event- driven applications.
• Unified authentication and authorization service across all Vox Media and New York Media properties to unlock new business opportunities.

About the role:

We’re looking for an experienced Senior Engineer to join our Ecosystems team to build the core backend systems that power our applications and deliver just-in-time data at Vox Media. The Ecosystems team is a diverse distributed team of skilled engineers, and you will play a large role in defining the technical direction and culture. This is a role with a lot of autonomy to build the next APIs and services, and define the architecture patterns for Vox Media product teams. We are dedicated to cross-disciplinary product thinking and vision and prize thoughtful and collaborative work.

What you’ll do: 

• Plan, architect, and build core backend services including GraphQL and REST APIs that power applications at Vox Media. Translate product requirements into clear and actionable engineering tasks.
• Mentor junior team members and provide support across teams that use our services.
• Give constructive feedback to team members via code reviews and architectural discussions.
• Surface technical risks and debt to the team that could impact performance, security, or the ability to scale our tech in the future.
• Continually improve the observability of Publishing Platform services to enhance performance and reliability.
• Contribute to an engineering culture that is inclusive, transparent, supportive, and focused on delivery.
• Help us deliver award-winning journalism to our amazing readers every single day.

What you’ll bring:

• At least 5 years of experience as a software engineer building web services and APIs that follow best practices for scaling and performance
• Proficiency in at least one major language and framework (JavaScript, Node.js, Ruby, Rails, or other backend technologies)
• A point of view on best practices, technical trade-offs, and evaluating vendor software (e.g. CDN, cloud services), as well as expertise in supporting opinions with research and experience
• A commitment to writing well structured code supported by unit, integration, and snapshot testing
• Strong communication skills and the ability to work and collaborate with a distributed team
• Great documentation skills
• Courage to refactor code when necessary
• Experience leading cross-disciplinary collaboration with other product teams and community.
• Passion for supporting and contributing to a safe, diverse, and inclusive culture

Bonus Points for: 

• Experience building GraphQL API services in Node.js (Relay, Apollo or similar)
• Experience with Docker and Kubernetes
• Experience cloud providers (AWS or GCP)
• Experience with multi-tenant architecture
• Experience working with news organizations
• Experience working with a remote-first team

About working at Vox Media:

This is a permanent, full-time position with excellent benefits—including flexible hours and generous parental leave. Vox Media strives to provide comprehensive healthcare options for our employees and to ensure that our healthcare and other benefits are LGBTQ-inclusive. You’ll be joining a group of focused, hard-working, creative people who are passionate about doing work that’s challenging and fun—and who strive to maintain a healthy work/life balance.

Vox Media is committed to building an inclusive environment for people of all backgrounds and everyone is encouraged to apply. Vox Media is an Equal Opportunity Employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, religion, disability, national origin, protected veteran status, age, or any other status protected by applicable national, federal, state, or local law.

Tagged as: 501+ Employees, Hide US-Only Jobs, Venture Funded