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Salary: USD 160,000 - 220,000 / annual
Vox Media is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead technical initiatives across New York Magazine's journalism and consumer subscriptions business. You will shape the technology behind the websites, publishing platform, and subscription experiences for New York, The Cut, Vulture, Intelligencer, The Strategist, Grub Street, and Curbed, as well as the NYMag mobile apps for iOS and Android.
As a hands-on technical engineering leader, you will help editors publish compelling stories, readers discover journalism they value, and subscribers maximize their relationship with these brands. Your work will span editorial experiences and the subscriber journey, from registration and purchase through onboarding, account management, and ongoing engagement.
Key responsibilities include:
- Leading complex engineering initiatives by translating product and business needs into technical plans, aligning collaborators around architectural decisions, and guiding projects from discovery through delivery and operation.
- Building and improving consumer subscription experiences, including subscription offers, checkout flows, promotions, gifting, onboarding, and account management features.
- Strengthening subscriber identity and access by improving integrations connecting authentication, payments, subscription status, and content entitlements across web and mobile.
- Supporting experimentation and growth through partnership with consumer revenue, product, and analytics teams to improve paywalls and registration experiences.
- Evolving the publishing platform by building reusable components, editorial tools, and reader experiences that support distinct brand needs.
- Contributing to the NYMag mobile app by partnering with mobile engineers on reading experiences, content discovery, and subscriber features.
- Guiding incremental modernization by identifying architectural risks, improving developer workflows, and balancing near-term delivery with long-term maintainability.
- Improving quality and reliability through investigating production issues, strengthening automated testing and observability, and addressing performance, accessibility, and security concerns.
- Championing responsible AI use by developing AI-assisted and agentic workflows while protecting sensitive information and maintaining accountability.
- Mentoring engineers, leading code and design reviews, documenting decisions, and establishing shared practices that improve team effectiveness.
You will partner with product, design, editorial, and consumer revenue teams to guide technical decisions and deliver improvements across web and mobile platforms. The tech stack includes Node.js, Express, Clay CMS, Vue, Handlebars, TypeScript, React Native, and Expo.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Deep JavaScript expertise and substantial experience building and operating production web applications and Node.js services.
- Track record of leading complex technical initiatives across systems or teams, with impact beyond individual contributions.
- Strong frontend fundamentals including HTML, CSS, accessibility, browser behavior, and application performance, with experience in frameworks such as Vue or React.
- Experience designing APIs, data models, and integrations, including reliable handling of authentication, authorization, and transactional workflows.
- Sound judgment when evolving mature codebases, knowing when to extend existing patterns and when to introduce new approaches.
- Strong debugging and testing skills with experience diagnosing problems across application, service, and data boundaries.
- Ability to connect engineering decisions to reader experience and business outcomes, including subscription conversion, engagement, and retention.
- Experience using AI development tools responsibly, including providing useful context, evaluating generated output, and recognizing when human review is essential.
- Clear communication, collaborative technical leadership, and ability to contribute to TypeScript and React Native codebases.
VALUABLE ADDITIONAL EXPERIENCE:
- Consumer subscriptions, digital media, ecommerce, or businesses built around recurring customer relationships.
- Paywalls, payment platforms, subscription billing integrations, identity systems, or entitlement management.
- Experimentation platforms, conversion analytics, and customer lifecycle experiences.
- React Native, Expo, or shipping applications for iOS and Android.
- Content management systems, editorial workflows, PostgreSQL, Redis, or Elasticsearch.
- Building reusable AI workflows, agent tooling, or automation that improves engineering productivity.
