Lead Engineer

About the role

Help shape the next generation of personalized discovery at Hearst. In this hands-on engineering leadership role, you’ll architect and build the systems that power smarter content and commerce recommendations—creating experiences that deepen engagement, drive conversion, and build loyalty across our digital ecosystem.

Key Responsibilities

• Architect and develop services for real-time personalization across content feeds, product recommendations, newsletters, and marketing funnels.
• Build scalable APIs and supporting infrastructure to enable dynamic recommendation experiences across web, mobile, and email.
• Design end-to-end implementations for recommendation features, from data ingestion through ranking logic to delivery.
• Ensure high standards for performance, security, observability, and fault tolerance across production systems.
• Partner with Product, Data, and UX to define technical requirements that balance personalization sophistication with performance and privacy.
• Partner with ML/GenAI teams to evaluate and integrate LLM-enabled capabilities (e.g., semantic search, affinity prediction, ranking, and summarization) where they improve personalization outcomes.
• Lead experimentation on AI-powered recommendation enhancements (e.g., hybrid LLM and collaborative filtering approaches).
• Provide hands-on mentorship and technical leadership to a blended team of full-time and contract engineers; drive planning, scoping, and prioritization.
• Lead build-vs-buy evaluations for personalization tooling, experimentation platforms, and recommendation infrastructure; integrate third-party solutions as needed.

Qualifications

• Must-have 10+ years in software engineering, with a focus on backend systems, personalization, or e-commerce platforms.
• Hands-on development expertise in Python, React, and building microservices at scale.
• Deep knowledge of recommendation systems: collaborative filtering, ranking algorithms, content-based and hybrid models.
• Ability to lead through influence in cross-functional environments and drive alignment across product, data, design, and engineering stakeholders.
• Demonstrated experience guiding and mentoring engineers, including coordinating work across contractors and/or vendor partners.

Benefits

• The base salary for this role is between $172,000 - $180,000.
• The actual base pay offered is dependent upon many factors, such as: transferable skills, work experience, business needs and market demands.
• Hearst is an Equal Opportunity Employer.