Engineering Manager, Community

About the role

The New York Times is looking for an Engineering Manager to lead our Community team within the News Product mission. This team is responsible for the end-to-end experience of our reader participation features, including commenting, conversations and other forms of reader engagement on web and native apps. We build both the scalable backend services that power these experiences and the internal tools that allow our newsroom and moderation partners to steward safe, productive discussions. As we evolve how readers participate in and around our journalism, this team will lead the expansion from traditional article comments into richer, more conversational experiences across platforms.

Responsibilities

• Lead a cross-platform team of engineers working across backend services, web and native clients that power comments, conversations and other reader engagement experiences.
• Guide the technical vision and roadmap for expanding Community features beyond traditional comments into new formats and surfaces, in partnership with product, design and newsroom partners.
• Oversee the development of high-availability backend services alongside the internal tools and UIs that moderators, editors and product teams use to manage reader participation.
• Ensure the reliability, performance and safety of Community systems, including incident response, post-incident reviews and follow-up work for highly visible reader experiences.
• Partner with Product, Design and Data counterparts to prioritize investments that balance immediate operational needs (for example, moderation and safety) with longer-term platform modernization and experimentation.
• Contribute to the broader News Product mission by leading cross-team technical or cultural programs.
• Represent the Community team in high-level technical discussions, where you identify risks and make calculated tradeoffs between feature velocity, reader safety, and platform stability.

Qualifications

• 2+ years of experience as an Engineering Manager leading high-functioning engineering teams.
• Experience managing cross-disciplinary engineers (for example, backend, web, native or DevOps) and overseeing mission-critical production operations for user-facing systems.
• Prior experience as a senior or staff-level engineer building and operating backend services and/or native app features in a production environment.
• Experience collaborating with product, design and data partners on roadmap planning and delivery.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience applying AI-assisted or agentic workflows in engineering, such as AI-assisted moderation, analytics or developer tooling for Community systems.
• Experience with user-generated content platforms, commenting systems or moderation pipelines in Community or Trust & Safety domains.
• Experience with modern web and app stacks includes React and Node.js, Golang, and/or native mobile frameworks.
• Experience with cloud platforms, such as AWS or GCP.
• Experience with event-driven architectures and observability tooling.

Benefits

This role is offered on a hybrid schedule, with the option to come into the office 2 days per week. Benefits may include medical, dental and vision benefits, Flexible Spending Accounts (FSA), a company-matching 401(k) plan, paid vacation, paid sick days, paid parental leave, tuition reimbursement and professional development programs.