Staff Software Engineer, Personalization

Job Description:

About the Team

The Personalization team builds recommendation, contextual suggestion, and related-content discovery experiences across Dow Jones digital surfaces. We combine reader activity, editorial priorities, trending content, and semantic similarity to deliver timely, relevant, and diverse journalism to our audience. We partner closely across Product, Data Analytics, Platform Engineering, and Editorial teams to create engaging, impactful experiences for millions of readers.

About the Role

We are looking for a Staff Software Engineer to join our Personalization team in Barcelona. In this role, you will define the technical direction for core personalization services, overseeing everything from candidate retrieval and scoring to ranking and surface-specific business logic. You will translate complex user and business requirements into highly reliable systems and measurable improvements in content discovery. This is a senior individual contributor role combining hands-on technical execution, architectural leadership, and team mentorship, reporting into the Engineering Director.

You Will

• Design, build, and operate personalization services that deliver relevant content across Dow Jones products.
• Lead the evolution of personalization and recommendation workflows, from candidate generation and retrieval through filtering, scoring, reranking and cold-start.
• Scale algorithmic improvements and ML-based ranking, including model integration, feature development, evaluation, and tuning.
• Own technical design and production quality, including scalability, latency, observability, SLOs, incident response, and post-incident learning.
• Set engineering direction and standards through design documents, architecture decisions, code reviews, and mentorship.
• Enhance operational efficiency across CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code, and containerized deployments, leveraging AI-assisted developer tools where appropriate.

You Have

• 7+ years of experience in software engineering, focused on architecting and delivering high-performance, distributed backend systems (TypeScript and Node.js preferred).
• Demonstrated experience as a technical lead or senior individual contributor, owning architecture and guiding engineering teams (experience designing and scaling recommendation and content discovery systems is preferred).
• Proven experience designing and implementing production RESTful APIs and GraphQL services.
• Experience implementing, testing, deploying, troubleshooting and supporting multi-region, multi-environment systems with CI/CD, high availability and disaster recovery.
• Hands-on experience with infrastructure-as-code (e.g., Terraform) and automated deployment tools.
• Experience with Docker and Kubernetes for containerised deployments in production environments.
• Experience using LLMs in production, such as for content labeling or embeddings. GenAI experience is a plus, not a requirement.
• Degree in Computer Science or a related field or equivalent working experience.

 Our Benefits

• Comprehensive Healthcare Plans for you and your family (paid by Dow Jones)
• Extra paid Time Off (30 days of holidays/year)
• Possibility to work remotely for 3 months/year (desplazamiento program) or one week of remote work per quarter
• Meal benefit with Pluxee (171€/month on top of your salary)
• Retirement Plans (Dow Jones will pay 2% of a members Pensionable Salary and match employee contribution up to a maximum of 3 %).
• Comprehensive Insurance Plans
• Well-being Resources (200 USD allowance per quarter, Classpass, etc.)
• Family Care Benefits & Caregiving Support
• Subscription Discounts
• Employee Referral Program (2,500 USD for referring a talent)

Learn more about us and our benefits click here.

Equal Opportunity Employer

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, age, national origin, protected veteran status, disability status or any other protected characteristic. We strongly encourage applications from all qualified individuals, including women, people with disabilities, and those from underrepresented groups.

Reasonable Accommodation

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodation for qualified individuals with disabilities in our job application and/or interview process. If you need assistance or accommodation in completing your application or participating in an interview due to a disability, email us at [email protected]. Please put "Reasonable Accommodation" in the subject line and provide a brief description of the type of assistance you need. This inbox will not be monitored for application status updates.

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Business Area:

Dow Jones - Technology

Job Category:

Software Product Engineering

Union Status:

Non-Union role
Base Pay Range: 70,000 € - 90,000 € + Bonus

We’re committed to offering competitive and flexible compensation to attract top talent. This pay range reflects our good faith estimate for the role and may vary based on a candidate’s experience, skills, location, and other relevant factors.

For bonus-eligible roles, targets are determined based on multiple considerations, including market benchmarks and individual contributions.

For benefits-eligible roles, we offer a comprehensive and competitive benefits package covering health, retirement, wellbeing, and more, along with optional benefits to meet the diverse needs of our employees.