Software Engineer II, Ad Engineering

We’re on a mission to deliver riveting storytelling for all of America. At The Washington Post, you’ll help reinvent news. Our work is driven by a deep investigative spirit and enhanced by innovation to bring audiences closer to the stories that matter most.

The Washington Post is powered by the passion and talent of our people. It takes all of us to reinvent news. Beyond our award-winning Newsroom and Opinions teams, we work across many departments, including Brand & Events, Communications, Customer Care, Engineering & Product, Finance, Human Resources, Legal, Marketing & Advertising, Print Operations, and Sales.

The Washington Post is hiring a Software Engineer to join its Ad Engineering team. We work with the product, business intelligence, and advertising teams to develop innovative software that maximizes revenue through our digital advertising business, which helps fund the best journalism in the world.

It's an exciting time to join this team. There are tremendous changes occurring in the digital advertising and publishing ecosystem, and this team is on the front lines of navigating that change. You'll get the opportunity to work on a large portfolio of diverse software, ranging from custom ad experiences and content management platforms to AI-driven targeting software and operations tools.

In this position, you would work with a number of LLM-focused technologies that enable our targeting and sales operations. We are looking for opinionated engineers with a clear set of ideas around best practices and purposes for LLMs within sales, marketing, and advertising. The ideal candidate will be able to take ownership over specific tools and vendors integrations and assure we maximize the value of our partnerships with a variety of ad tech vendors.

What Motivates You

• You like to work on different projects in a nimble development environment with a team that likes to move fast and deliver impact in a short time frame.
• You love to collaborate with non-technical colleagues to help figure out creative solutions to a wide range of problems.
• You are an independent, self-motivated problem solver that thrives in an environment where flexibility and creativity are paramount.
• You are energized working with front-end and back-end technologies.
• You have an eye for detail and a passion for quality.

How You'll Support the Mission

• You'll partner with senior engineers and product managers to build and maintain products that directly drive revenue for The Post.
• You will build best practices for the use of and integration with AI across complex projects and multi-team systems.
• You'll partner with sales and operational experts to build out tools that will make them more effective.
• You'll develop code that will support not only standard ad systems and programmatic, but also our media player experiences and games pages.

The Skills and Experience You Bring

• Participate in all stages of software development - from brainstorming and prototyping to designing, implementing, testing, and support.
• Follow engineering best practices and coding standards across a variety of projects.
• Work directly with Product Managers, Designers, Advertising Operations, and other stakeholders to translate business requirements into highly performant applications.
• Build and deploy applications on AWS.
• Occasionally influence other teams to accept technology processes or products, requiring detailed explanations or interpretations.
• Communicate with parties within and outside the department, and occasionally with external parties such as customers and vendors.
• Establish, document, maintain, and build on best practices with LLM systems inside our organization.

Qualifications

• 2+ years of experience building and delivering highly-performant, customer-facing applications
• Proficiency in modern JavaScript development principles, especially strongly typed systems and architectures.
• Hands-on experience developing, deploying, and maintaining systems using AWS services such as ECS, EC2, RDS, S3, and Lambda
• Exposure to DevOps technologies like Docker and CI/CD systems such as Jenkins, AWS Code Pipeline
• Familiarity with developing in the digital advertising ecosystem using Prebid, Google Ad Manager, and Prebid Server platforms is desirable but not required
• Experience writing unit tests and integration tests to ensure code quality
• Experience with LLM-based text processing pipelines and ChatGPT-style APIs for AI-powered user experiences.
• Experience working with sales teams is a plus.
• Experience working on text analysis, especially with regard to safety, is a plus.

Wherever you are in your life or career, The Washington Post offers comprehensive and inclusive benefits for every step of your journey:

• Competitive medical, dental and vision coverage

• Company-paid pension and 401(k) match

• Three weeks of vacation and up to three weeks of paid sick leave

• Nine paid holidays and two personal days

• 20 weeks paid parental leave for any new parent

• Robust mental health resources

• Backup care and caregiver concierge services

• Gender affirming services

• Pet insurance

• Free Post digital subscription

• Leadership and career development programs

Benefits may vary based on the job, full-time or part-time schedule, location, and collectively bargained status.

The salary range for this position is:

The actual salary within this range will depend on individual skills, experience, and qualifications as they relate to specific job requirements. This position may be eligible for a bonus or incentive program, and a member of the Talent Acquisition team will discuss bonus payment terms and conditions during the interview process.