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Versant Media · 1 day ago

Principal Engineer

New York, NY

Full-time

Hybrid

Lead/Staff

$170K/yr - $200K/yr

Versant Media is a leading force in news, sports, and entertainment, seeking a highly accomplished Principal Web & Content Supply Chain Engineer. This role involves serving as the chief technical authority and architectural leader for their Direct-to-Consumer applications, focusing on delivering high-performance and secure digital experiences across various platforms.

BroadcastingInformation TechnologyMedia and Entertainment

Responsibilities

Architectural Leadership & Strategy Define DTC Architecture

Lead the strategic development and implementation of the application architecture for all consumer-facing DTC properties (websites, APIs), focusing on scalability, performance, security, and maintainability, with a mandate to achieve and maintain aggressive Service Level Objectives (SLOs)

Establish a Center of Excellence: Act as the subject matter expert, setting the technical standards, coding best practices, and governance playbooks for all engineering teams building and supporting Versant Media's digital applications

Performance & Observability: Own the strategy for application observability, logging, monitoring, and alerting. Drive initiatives to maximize page load speed, Core Web Vitals (CWV), and overall application health through deep analysis and optimization of data-intensive operations

Content Supply Chain & CMS Integration Content Management System (CMS) Ownership: Serve as the technical lead for our CMS architecture, defining the integration points, API specifications, and workflow logic to ensure a seamless, efficient content publishing pipeline, including support for user-generated content workflows

API Design & Governance: Define the architecture and standards for all public-facing and internal APIs that power the DTC apps, ensuring they are robust, performant, and correctly versioned, leveraging experience on an Architecture Council

Front-to-Back Integration: Oversee the technical integration between the core content repositories (CMS/MAM), microservices, and the final presentation layers across all web properties

Engineering Practices & Governance CI/CD Pipeline & Delivery: Define and optimize the Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipelines for front-end and back-end services, promoting frequent, high-quality, and automated releases

Security & Compliance: Establish and enforce security best practices across all DTC codebases and infrastructure, ensuring compliance with industry standards and internal policies

Mentorship & Code Review: Provide senior mentorship to engineering teams and conduct high-level technical design and code reviews across multiple systems to ensure alignment with architectural standards

Application Modernization & Technical Leadership System Modernization & Redesign: Lead the architectural redesign and replacement of core systems and legacy technology components, including writing technical designs and proposals to sunset old tech and achieve strategic modernization goals

Technical Debt & Upgrades: Champion efforts for technical debt elimination and lead major platform version upgrades across the digital application ecosystem

Innovation & Future-Proofing: Drive the continuous evolution of our technology stack through the evaluation and adoption of modern frameworks, cloud-native services, and engineering patterns

Qualification

Web application architectureContent Management Systems (CMS)API designGovernanceCloud-native developmentTypeScript/JavaScriptPythonGoNodePostgreSQLDynamoDBRedisElasticSearchCI/CD best practicesPerformance optimizationTechnical debt managementMentorshipTechnical leadership

Required

Proven experience with web application architecture, software engineering, and managing large-scale, consumer-facing digital platforms

Expert-level knowledge of modern web technologies, including TypeScript/JavaScript, and fluency in multiple back-end languages such as Python, Go, and Node

Deep expertise in Content Management Systems (CMS) architecture, schema design, workflow modeling, and integrating decoupled CMS solutions

Proven ability to design, document, and govern scalable, high-volume APIs (RESTful/GraphQL) and experience using a variety of datastores including PostgreSQL, Dynamo, Redis, and ElasticSearch

Strong understanding of cloud-native development (e.g., AWS, GCP, Azure), modern deployment strategies, and CI/CD best practices

A track record of success in optimizing application performance to achieve high SLOs (e.g., 99.99%) by implementing targeted caching, database optimization, and improving asynchronous call patterns