Senior Staff Software Engineer

The CNN New Business Engineering team is building a new portfolio of standalone consumer lifestyle products across mobile and web. Its mission is to create innovative, non-news experiences that enrich users' lives, deepen daily engagement with CNN, and drive the long-term growth of the direct-to-consumer business. This role is a senior technical leader with deep expertise in web software and system architecture design, combined with hands-on software development experience.

• Define, communicate, and evolve the architecture for customer-facing web applications, shared backend services, and CMS capabilities, ensuring alignment with business objectives and long-term technical strategy.
• Provide technical leadership throughout the software development lifecycle through architecture reviews, software design, hands-on development, code reviews, documentation, and technical mentoring.
• Partner with New Business engineering leadership to define and execute the long-term technical strategy, architecture roadmap, and platform evolution for CNN New Business.
• Influence technical decisions across multiple engineering teams and build strong partnerships with Business, Product, Design, and Editorial organisations to deliver cohesive customer experiences.
• Lead rapid prototyping efforts and technical exploration to validate new product ideas and accelerate 0-to-1 product development.
• Champion engineering excellence by establishing best practices for software architecture, code quality, testing, observability, reliability, security, and operational readiness.
• Mentor engineers, contribute to technical hiring, and help elevate the technical capabilities of the engineering organisation.
• Lead the adoption of AI-assisted engineering practices and identify opportunities to leverage AI to improve developer productivity and deliver differentiated customer experiences.

• Bachelor's degree in computer science or a related field, or equivalent industry experience.
• 15+ years of software engineering experience, including 5+ years of experience designing and building large-scale web applications and leading architecture for complex software systems.
• At least 2+ years of experience in a role where you defined and led architecture design.
• High-performance mindset to thrive in a fast-paced, agile environment with a focus on quickly delivering customer value over delivering a perfect solution.
• Exceptional verbal and written communication skills to influence technical and non-technical stakeholders across the company.
• Technical leadership and mentorship, with a leadership style rooted in strong collaboration and lifting others, and a willingness to share knowledge and experience across all teams.
• Experience in designing reusable components and platform capabilities that accelerate development across multiple consumer products and engineering teams.
• Strong full-stack engineering experience with modern web technologies and frameworks, including JavaScript/TypeScript, HTML/CSS, Python, Go, etc.
• Deep industry experience in designing and implementing highly scalable web applications, and hands-on familiarity with both client- and server-side technologies.
• Solid understanding of key design concepts: reliability, availability, security, privacy, analytics, observability, and operational readiness.
• Deep expertise in cloud-native architectures and experience designing, deploying, and operating systems in AWS, GCP, or Azure.
• Solid knowledge of operations, CI/CD, and DevOps.

• Experience with AWS is strongly preferred.