Senior Engineer, Data & AI - Temporary

Vox Media is a leading modern media company, home to influential and award-winning editorial brands across technology, sports, news, gaming, dining, shopping, and more. Our audience-first approach and commitment to innovation drive engagement and create opportunities for our advertising and commerce partners.

Vox Media is seeking a Senior Engineer to join our data team — a group at the intersection of data engineering, backend development, and generative AI applications. We’re responsible for the infrastructure and tools that power data-driven decision-making across the company, while also leading efforts to develop new intelligent services for our audiences and internal teams. This is a 12 month temporary position that reports to the Director of Engineering, Revenue Product & Data.

This is a hybrid role, blending strong back-end software development with applied data engineering and AI. You’ll play a central role in building and expanding Remix, our in-house content intelligence platform that uses AI to power recommendations, search, and dynamic content experiences across our brands. You’ll also contribute to VoxStar, our internal “user memory” system that manages personalization data for audience experiences. From time to time, you may also find yourself building and orchestrating new datasets or internal tools and data products.

If you’re an engineer who thrives at the intersection of software engineering and applied data/AI work, and you’re excited to shape how generative AI is used in modern media, we’d love to hear from you.

• Build and maintain production-grade back-end services - our typical stack is Python, FastAPI, PostgreSQL (Google Cloud SQL), and Google Cloud Run
• Develop and evolve AI-powered applications, using a mix of APIs from OpenAI, Gemini, or similar providers and open-source tools and frameworks - we use Pydantic AI to build agentic systems
• Contribute to Remix, our content intelligence platform, enabling search, recommendations, personalized marketing, and other experiences both reader facing and internal
• Help maintain and extend VoxStar, our user data store and internal memory layer for personalized experiences
• Write well-structured code, tests, and documentation for services that operate at scale and support multiple use cases and play a key role in API design for these services
• Along with the rest of the team, create deployment workflows, tune database and query performance, and manage (lightweight) cloud infrastructure 
• Collaborate with stakeholders in product, audience, and editorial to understand problems and translate them into technical solutions
• Occasionally contribute to data engineering workflows to build new datasets or tools, applying your Python and SQL skills outside of traditional back-end contexts - we use BigQuery, Dagster, dbt, Looker, and Hightouch

An experienced Python backend engineer with an interest in data and AI or data engineer who cares about writing high quality production grade code.

• Comfortable working in cloud-native environments to build and deploy APIs and services (preferably with FastAPI)
• Fluent in SQL and experienced with either analytics workflows in a cloud data warehouse or relational databases like Postgres 
• Interested in applying generative AI and LLM tooling to real-world problems — you don’t need to be an expert, but you should be eager, curious, and self-directed
• Thoughtful about architecture, trade-offs, and how to make things easy for others to build on
• Comfortable working independently, collaborating across functions, and shifting between well-scoped projects and more open-ended discovery work
  

If you meet some of these requirements but not all and think you’d be good for the role, we encourage you to apply anyway!

• Experience with semantic search, embedding-based retrieval, recommendation systems, and designing agentic systems
• Experience with data modeling and orchestration using tools like dbt and Dagster, or willing to learn
• Experience with multi-variate product testing at scale
• Experience modeling audience cohorts

Exposure to LLM frameworks (Pydantic AI, Langchain)

• Proficient in REST API design, load testing, and deployment best practices
• Comfort with CI/CD, observability tooling, ML Ops

If you think you have what it takes, but don't meet every single point in our job posting, please apply with a cover letter to let us know how you believe you can bring your unique skills to the Vox Media team or get in touch! We’ve hired chefs who became editors, DJs who became UX designers, and sommeliers who became writers.

This is a remote position.

This is a temporary, full-time position. This job is benefits-eligible. We pride ourselves in providing comprehensive benefits to support all of our employees wherever they are in life. You can find more information about our benefits here.

Vox Media is committed to building an inclusive environment where everyone can show up as their authentic selves and create their best work. We recognize that great stories, platforms, products and services come from people with all manner of backgrounds and experiences. We recognize that our commitments require ongoing work and sustained attention, as well as adaptation to new insights and best practices. We keep our diversity data public for the sake of accountability, transparency and communication. Learn more about our values here, and our approach to corporate citizenship here. 

Vox Media is an Equal Opportunity Employer and qualified applicants will receive consideration without regard to race, color, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, religion, disability, national origin, protected veteran status, age, or any other status protected by applicable national, federal, state, or local law. Vox Media will also consider all qualified applicants with criminal histories in accordance with applicable Fair Chance laws. We are also committed to providing reasonable accommodations as part of the application process to candidates with disabilities. If you require a reasonable accommodation as part of the application process, please contact our People & Culture team ([email protected]).

Our recruiting team will go through applications in a timely manner. Please note that our recruiting team will only contact you from @voxmedia.com email addresses, never via text message. Read more about how our recruiting team operates, and how to protect yourself from recruitment fraud, here.