Staff Software Engineer, Identity

Job Description

The Washington Post is seeking a highly skilled and motivated Staff Engineer to join our Identity/First Party Data team. This critical role involves architecting innovative solutions that address business challenges and ensure regulatory compliance while simplifying complex systems. As a key technical leader, the Staff Engineer will mentor fellow engineers, drive innovation through collaboration and automation, and provide crucial guidance on first party data security and privacy compliance systems and processes, both within the Engineering team and across the broader organization.

The Identity team is integral to the Monetization engineering organization, which is focused on generating revenue through subscriptions and advertising. Deeply understanding our users through robust Identity management is fundamental to our business. This role includes providing technical leadership for our first party data security and privacy compliance. The position offers a unique opportunity to collaborate on diverse projects and initiatives that support The Washington Post’s revenue generation while navigating complex privacy regulations and data security considerations. This role is vital in supporting the world-class journalism provided by The Post.

Motivation:

• You have a strong sense of ownership and accountability, and you are dedicated to instilling these values in your fellow teammates. 

• You are passionate about privacy and user data 

• You have an opinionated view of system design and architecture 

• You strive to write flexible and reusable code.

• You are eager to evolve and grow your personal skill set by learning and sharing knowledge about new software languages, tools, and applications. 

• You love to collaborate to figure out solutions to the toughest problems.

• You have an aptitude to simplify and communicate technical concepts to a non-technical audience.

Responsibilities:

• Build highly scalable, performant, secure, and fault tolerable cloud infrastructure and

• applications.

• Build reusable components, tools, and processes that are shared across teams and codebases for rapid development and scaling.

• Contribute to the development of technical documentation and design specifications for team members.

• Mentor and coach junior engineers, offering technical guidance and reviewing code to ensure quality.

• Collaborate with Product, Design, Newsroom, Legal, Customer Care and business stakeholders to manage and optimize project timelines, proactively identifying blockers and risks to ensure timely delivery.

• Proactively monitor privacy regulatory updates and maintain regular communication across the organization with other privacy stakeholders

• Support and foster a DevOps culture by empowering engineers to build, manage, and support existing infrastructure and databases.

• Write clear, maintainable code, following best practices in version control, code reviews, and testing.

• Actively contribute to the architecture and decision-making processes of large, complex projects.

• Stay abreast of emerging technologies and industry trends, integrating innovative solutions when applicable. 

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications

• BA/BS in Computer Science or a related technical field or equivalent practical experience.

• 7+ years’ experience with languages like Java, Python, and Node

• 3+ years’ experience with Amazon Web Services (AWS) such as S3, ECS, EC2, and CloudWatch, CloudFormation, IAM, Lambda, RDS, ElastiCache, OpenSearch, Cost Explorer, etc.

• Familiarity with DevOps best practices such as IAC, CI/CD, and automation.

• Experience with DevOps teams that own the full engineering lifecycle.

• Working knowledge of observability tools such as DataDog, Splunk, and Cloudwatch.

• Experience with monitoring the health of production applications in an on-call rotation.

• Demonstrated experience analyzing application and cloud environment performance.

• Experience working in a global business with customers in multiple time zones. 

• Strong written and verbal communication skills for collaboration with legal, product, and other stakeholders