About the Team (Hearst E-Commerce) 

 Hearst is a leading global, diversified media, information, and services company. Its major interests include: a large consumer media portfolio, including 300 magazines, 24 daily and 42 weekly newspapers, 33 broadcast TV stations, content production services, and ownership interests in ESPN and A&E; the global financial services company Fitch Group; Hearst Health, a provider of decision support data and software supporting healthcare; and Hearst Transportation, an industry leader in fleet and repair data. 

 Hearst E-commerce is a recently formed organization focused on developing and supporting E-Commerce across Hearst’s consumer media portfolio. Our goal is to make it easier to buy all the goods and services our thousands of journalists research every day. We work across a range of focus areas, including building and operating marketplaces, creating performance advertising tools, to helping develop editorial tools to simplify content creation workflows. This breadth helps give our team unique perspectives into the needs of Hearst’s reader and viewership across the globe. 

 As a member of the larger Hearst community, our team is focused on developing a supportive, inclusive culture, and giving back to our communities. Hearst employees have access to extensive training and development opportunities, ranging from robust internship, mentorship, and sponsorship programs to unique opportunities to partner with emerging women-led startups in media, technology and data funded through HearstLab, one of our venture investment groups. Our community support includes the Hearst Foundation, which has overseen more than $1.3 billion in grants to build healthy, productive, and inspiriting opportunities, to our corporate donation matching. 

 Your Impact 

The E-Commerce organization develops tools for use by Hearst’s collection of publications, ranging from marketplace platforms to local business and service discovery tools. Our team is focused on prototyping and testing new commerce ideas, primarily within our regionally focused media properties (Newspapers and TV.) Your role will be within our Events team, which works as a cross-disciplinary practice (product, engineering, editorial, and sales/marketing) to prototype and deploy new product concepts within the Local Events space. The intent of these experiments is to test which concepts resonate with our readership as well as our advertising clients. Successful work will then be scaled to our broader media portfolio. 

Our team is focused on rapid experimentation: some concepts go from whiteboard to website in the same week, followed by iteration to improve the idea based on behavioral data and feedback. As a senior engineer, you will contribute significantly to shaping our roadmap to deliver world-class, high-performance, innovative experiences. You will own Search and Recommendations, and also work closely with the front-end side of our team to ensure we deliver high performing (fast, light) sites that make it easy to browse on low bandwidth connections. You will also work on ML and LLM R&D to enrich our  users' journey, starting from product discovery and research all the way through to purchase.  

 We welcome folks with a curious spirit, who enjoy a mix of small-scale experimentation and high-scale systems development. Our roles involve a mix of design, development, and support, and provide a unique cross-organization opportunity to work across print, digital, and broadcast media. Our systems are developed in React and Django. Elastic/OpenSearch expertise is essential to be successful from the start.  

Your Day-To-Day 

Architect and design new features and systems with the support of our product and design teams using a combination of internally developed and third-party solutions. Build the designs you’ve created! Partner with our operations teams to deploy and scale services we build across Hearst. Collaborate with product managers and engineers across Hearst to define product roadmaps and technical investments. Be both a mentor and a mentee for your peers and the extended engineering team at Hearst. 

About you  

No two projects are alike, nor are two candidates. The following experiences are common within your peer group, but not strict requirements. 

5 years of experience building at-scale backend systems in a language of your choice. (Python or JavaScript/NodeJS are preferred, but not required.) A knowledge of how to scale a small experiment (hundreds of concurrent users) to web-scale audiences (hundreds of thousands of concurrent users). A curiosity and willingness to work with frontend teams to design more effective APIs and resolve client-side performance issues. Knowledge of best practices for observability and instrumentation in a complex microservice environment. Experience working with data engineering teams to help stream data to off-application analytical tools. An interest in creating and fostering mentorship cultures, including mentoring, and being mentored. Design, development, and/or operating experience with an at-scale (>$500MM GMV annually) E-commerce site (marketplace or retailer) that sells directly to consumers, an at-scale E-commerce infrastructure or platform services that support, but do not provide, a marketplace or retail store directly, or a mix of the two. A bachelor’s degree in a technical field or equivalent real-life experience.