Jobs at NPR

Manages music rights clearances and licensing for NPR Music productions, including Tiny Desk. Responsibilities include securing publishing, master, synchronization, performance, and appearance rights; managing digital platform claims; coordinating royalties; administering agreements; designing clearance workflows; and partnering with legal counsel, production teams, artists, labels, and external rights holders.

Develops NPR podcast, program, and product brands through visual identity systems, including logos, typography, color palettes, key art, guidelines, and social templates. Creates integrated marketing campaigns across digital, social, video, outdoor, and other channels; contributes big ideas, collaborates with copywriters and strategists, presents work to stakeholders, and ensures high-quality, consistent brand execution under tight deadlines.

Reviews and copy edits NPR journalism across digital, broadcast, video, and multiplatform content before publication or air. Ensures accuracy, fairness, consistency, and adherence to AP and NPR style. Collaborates with editors, platform leads, newsroom managers, and standards teams; manages high-volume workflows and breaking-news deadlines; determines additional review needs; and uses content-performance data to improve editorial practices.

Manage, deploy, maintain, and troubleshoot physical and virtualized data center infrastructure, including servers, storage, networking, hypervisors, and private cloud platforms. Responsibilities include hardware build-outs, architecture testing, capacity planning, change management, security compliance, workflow analysis, documentation, incident escalation, and on-call support. The role requires collaboration with infrastructure and security teams to maintain highly available and resilient systems.

Leads ACPR’s federal government affairs and nonpartisan advocacy strategy. Builds congressional and federal agency relationships, manages lobbying disclosure compliance, tracks legislation and regulations, briefs leadership, and coordinates policy briefings, delegations, and advocacy days. Researches policymakers and hearings, develops advocacy materials, and supports public radio stations through appropriations and legislative engagement. The role requires extensive Capitol Hill networks, House experience, federal appropriations knowledge, bipartisan communication, and strong collaboration skills.

Leads NPR’s federal government affairs and policy strategy, monitoring legislation and regulations involving copyright, AI, telecommunications, privacy, and public media. Serves as a registered lobbyist, manages LDA compliance, builds relationships with Congress, federal agencies, associations, and industry stakeholders, and represents NPR before regulatory bodies including the FCC. Researches policymakers, briefs leadership, develops advocacy strategies, and partners on external policy communications.

Manages state grassroots advocacy campaigns supporting public radio stations. Coordinates advocacy plans, model legislation, policy materials, legislative monitoring, stakeholder relationships, advocacy visits, and communications across assigned states. Translates complex policy and budget issues into accessible briefings and talking points while collaborating with public radio stations, lawmakers, coalitions, and NPR teams.

Leads NPR’s executive talent strategy for journalists, hosts, commentators, and creative contributors. Responsibilities include talent relationship management, scouting and pipeline development, contract negotiation, career stewardship, cross-functional mediation, editorial and mission alignment, audience trend analysis, and diversity initiatives. The role partners with Content, People, Legal, Marketing, Operations, and member stations to attract and retain high-impact multimedia talent.

Leads NPR’s content strategy and business development, including negotiating distribution, co-production, licensing, syndication, and revenue-sharing partnerships. Expands enterprise distribution across digital, streaming, audio, and public media channels while protecting editorial independence. Oversees partner relationships, intellectual property, budgets, resource allocation, business operations, financial modeling, and divisional OKRs. Collaborates with executive, editorial, legal, finance, product, and station-relations teams to drive audience growth and sustainable revenue.

Leads architecture for unified native mobile and cross-platform systems, scalable personalization and media delivery pipelines, distributed services, APIs, and client applications. Guides multi-team technology strategy, governance, security, privacy compliance, cost optimization, deployments, incident response, and code quality. Mentors engineers, conducts reviews, evaluates technologies, and contributes resilient production code across iOS, Android, cloud, CDN, and data systems.

Produces and experiments with short-form social video for Planet Money and The Indicator, adapting audio journalism for visual platforms. Collaborates with editors, producers, hosts, and NPR social teams; shoots, edits, publishes, and evaluates video using audience data. Trains audio producers in video tools, storytelling, and analytics, while developing sustainable workflows, social strategy, captions, and supporting copy. The role requires editorial judgment, ethical compliance, cross-platform expertise, project management, and collaboration in a hybrid New York City setting.

Legal externs support NPR’s Office of the General Counsel by conducting legal research, preparing memoranda, contracts, and other documents, participating in client and regulatory meetings, observing proceedings, and attending legal training. The role spans commercial, nonprofit tax, governance, technology, intellectual property, regulatory, constitutional, employment, and labor matters. Applicants must be current law students and secure academic credit for fall or spring placements.

Legal externs assist senior counsel with copyright research, fair use determinations, audio and video content evaluations, permissions agreements, licensing assessments, and rights management. The role is a full-time, summer, for-credit or stipend-eligible opportunity for current second- or third-year law students with coursework and knowledge in copyright law and fair use.

Leads and develops a team of mobile software engineers building NPR applications. Responsibilities include coaching, hiring, Agile delivery, technical planning, code and design reviews, workflow automation, production incident response, vendor coordination, and cross-functional collaboration. The role requires prior hands-on mobile engineering experience, proficiency in native iOS or Android technologies, release infrastructure, Git, and Agile/Scrum practices.

The IT Network Manager oversees network infrastructure, manages a team of engineers, and ensures high availability and security for real-time media transport in a collaborative environment.

Lead and modernize NPR's total rewards strategy and operations, overseeing benefits, retirement, compensation, vendor management, audits, compliance (ERISA, ACA, Form 5500), and HRIS/UKG configuration. Drive compensation analytics, annual planning, budget ownership, legacy systems remediation, data controls, and cross-functional partnerships with Finance, Legal, Payroll, and HRIS. Manage and develop the Total Rewards team and deliver communications and training.