Puzzle Designer Jobs (NOW HIRING)

The mission of The New York Times is to seek the truth and help people understand the world. That means independent journalism is at the heart of all we do as a company. It's why we have a world-renowned newsroom that sends journalists to report on the ground from nearly 160 countries. It's why we focus deeply on how our readers will experience our journalism, from print to audio to a world-class digital and app destination. And it's why our business strategy centers on making journalism so good that it's worth paying for.
About the Role, Mission or Department Overview
The New York Times is looking for a Web Platform Engineer with full-stack skills to join the Web Platform squad within the Games team.
You'll join a foundational squad of engineers, designers, and product managers to help create incredible, immersive gaming experiences across The New York Times' suite of unique games. Additionally, you'll build the infrastructure and new puzzle capabilities that power our world-class content including the internal editorial tools that allow our puzzle creators to delight our players daily. You'll also be part of an engineering organization that values transparency, diversity, learning, and building a community of practice.
This is a hybrid role based in our New York City headquarters.
Responsibilities:

• Develop the foundational web infrastructure and shared component libraries that help engineering teams to ship high-quality gaming experiences.
• Develop new puzzle capabilities for the internal editorial platform, empowering content creators to build immersive new games.
• Build performant, scalable APIs in Go to support the evolving needs of the Games ecosystem.
• Collaborate with partners in Product, Design, and Production to translate creative visions into technical solutions.
• Champion operational and tech excellence by participating in code reviews, defining best practices, and contributing to the engineering community of practice.
• Demonstrate support and understanding of our value of journalistic independence
• You'll report to the Engineering Manager, Games Web Platform Squad.

Basic Qualifications:

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience building and maintaining features within high-traffic, large-scale distributed systems.
• Proficiency in front-end fundamentals and frameworks, including JavaScript (ES6+), semantic HTML, and CSS/SCSS, and React (or a similar modern framework.)
• Experience building shared component libraries to guide UI consistency and developer velocity across an organization, which they designed.
• Experience writing performant server-side code; while we use Go, experience with Java or Python is applicable.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure including AWS (or GCP), containerized environments (Docker), and Edge computing/CDNs like Fastly.
• A collaborative, product-oriented mindset with experience working with partners like Product, Design, and Editorial teams.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Prior experience in the gaming industry with web-based games, puzzles, or interactive media.
• Experience with CI/CD automation (e.g., GitHub Actions, Drone, or Terraform) and a "DevOps" approach to platform stability.
• Familiarity with monitoring and observability tools (e.g., Datadog, Sentry, or Grafana) to improve the player experience.

This role will require limited on-call hours. An on-call schedule will be determined when you join, taking into account team size and other variables.
#LI-Hybrid
REQ-020157
The annual base pay range for this role is between:
$140,000-$160,000 USD
For roles in the U.S., dependent on your role, you may be eligible for variable pay, such as an annual bonus and restricted stock. Benefits may include medical, dental and vision benefits, Flexible Spending Accounts (F.S.A.s), a company-matching 401(k) plan, paid vacation, paid sick days, paid parental leave, tuition reimbursement and professional development programs.
For roles outside of the U.S., information on benefits will be provided during the interview process.
We're excited to learn more about you and your experience. To keep our hiring process as fair and authentic as possible, we ask that you submit your own work and not use GenAI tools to generate substantive content during the application and interview process.
If you're an Engineering candidate, we'll let you know what specific GenAI tools you are permitted to use for your technical assessment.
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