Senior Engineer, Vox Media

• If you’re an engineer who thrives at the intersection of software engineering and applied data/AI work, and you’re excited to shape how generative AI is used in modern media, we’d love to hear from you
• An experienced Python backend engineer with an interest in data and AI or data engineer who cares about writing high quality production grade code
• Comfortable working in cloud-native environments to build and deploy APIs and services (preferably with FastAPI)
• Fluent in SQL and experienced with either analytics workflows in a cloud data warehouse or relational databases like Postgres
• Interested in applying generative AI and LLM tooling to real-world problems — you don’t need to be an expert, but you should be eager, curious, and self-directed
• Thoughtful about architecture, trade-offs, and how to make things easy for others to build on
• Comfortable working independently, collaborating across functions, and shifting between well-scoped projects and more open-ended discovery work

Desirable

• This is a 12 month temporary position that reports to the Director of Engineering, Revenue Product & Data
• Vox Media is seeking a Senior Engineer to join our data team — a group at the intersection of data engineering, backend development, and generative AI applications. We’re responsible for the infrastructure and tools that power data-driven decision-making across the company, while also leading efforts to develop new intelligent services for our audiences and internal teams
• This is a hybrid role, blending strong back-end software development with applied data engineering and AI. You’ll play a central role in building and expanding Remix, our in-house content intelligence platform that uses AI to power recommendations, search, and dynamic content experiences across our brands
• You’ll also contribute to VoxStar, our internal “user memory” system that manages personalization data for audience experiences. From time to time, you may also find yourself building and orchestrating new datasets or internal tools and data products
• Build and maintain production-grade back-end services - our typical stack is Python, FastAPI, PostgreSQL (Google Cloud SQL), and Google Cloud Run
• Develop and evolve AI-powered applications, using a mix of APIs from OpenAI, Gemini, or similar providers and open-source tools and frameworks - we use Pydantic AI to build agentic systems
• Contribute to Remix, our content intelligence platform, enabling search, recommendations, personalized marketing, and other experiences both reader facing and internal
• Help maintain and extend VoxStar, our user data store and internal memory layer for personalized experiences
• Write well-structured code, tests, and documentation for services that operate at scale and support multiple use cases and play a key role in API design for these services
• Along with the rest of the team, create deployment workflows, tune database and query performance, and manage (lightweight) cloud infrastructure
• Collaborate with stakeholders in product, audience, and editorial to understand problems and translate them into technical solutions
• Occasionally contribute to data engineering workflows to build new datasets or tools, applying your Python and SQL skills outside of traditional back-end contexts - we use BigQuery, Dagster, dbt, Looker, and Hightouch