Senior Staff Software Engineer - Rendering & Delivery, MediaOS
Job Description
We're seeking a Senior Staff Software Engineer to provide senior technical leadership for the design and implementation of Arc XP's next-generation rendering platform.
This is a highly visible individual-contributor leadership role for an engineer who can operate at both the architectural and implementation levels. You'll partner with architects, engineering leaders, product managers, and senior engineers to translate Arc XP's Experience Composition strategy into scalable production systems.
You'll help lead technical direction across areas such as edge rendering and composition, render-on-update architectures, component and extension models, platform and compilation APIs, content delivery, performance, and AI-enabled experience creation.
Just as importantly, you'll help define how we evolve from today's platform to that future state while continuing to reliably support customers operating at significant scale.
What Motivates You
You want to help build the next generation of a large-scale rendering and digital experience platform.
You're excited by difficult problems at the intersection of web rendering, distributed systems, edge computing, content delivery, and AI.
You enjoy exploring where computation should happen: at build time, origin, edge, or client, and making those decisions based on performance, personalization, reliability, scalability, and cost.
You want to turn ambiguous product and architecture strategy into working production systems.
You enjoy challenging existing architectures and evaluating emerging technologies when there is a better way forward.
You lead through technical expertise and influence and enjoy helping other senior engineers succeed.
You balance innovation with the realities of evolving a large production platform without disrupting existing customers.
You want ownership from technical discovery and prototyping through implementation, rollout, observability, and production operations.
How You'll Support the Mission
Lead technical design and implementation of Arc XP's next-generation rendering and Experience Composition capabilities.
Design edge-rendering and edge-composition architectures, including component-level and server-island patterns, and lead the shift from TTL-driven regeneration to event-driven render-on-update models.
Design scalable platform, rendering, and compilation APIs, and evolve component and extension architectures that enable reuse and customization without unnecessary forks.
Help design the platform capabilities and APIs that let AI systems and agents programmatically create, compose, and update pages, templates, and components.
Define migration and interoperability strategies that evolve today's Rendering, Themes, and PageBuilder capabilities toward the next-generation platform while maintaining customer continuity.
Provide senior technical leadership across Rendering, Delivery, Themes, and PageBuilder Editor, keeping decisions coherent across interconnected areas.
Design, develop, and operate highly scalable services using TypeScript, Node.js, React, Go, AWS, and modern edge technologies.
Lead resolution of complex production and architectural issues, and drive improvements in reliability, observability, performance, security, and cost.
Mentor engineers through architecture discussions, design reviews, and hands-on collaboration.
Use AI-assisted engineering tools thoughtfully for prototyping, implementation, and troubleshooting, applying strong engineering judgment to generated output.
The Skills and Experience You Bring
Minimum Qualifications
8+ years of experience designing, building, and operating highly scalable software systems.
Significant experience providing technical leadership, setting technical direction, and designing architecture for complex initiatives spanning multiple systems or teams.
Deep knowledge of modern web rendering architectures, distributed and event-driven systems, APIs, caching and content delivery, and cloud-native application design.
Strong experience with JavaScript/TypeScript and modern web frameworks such as React, Astro, Next.js, or comparable technologies.
Experience designing and operating high-traffic systems where performance, scalability, availability, and reliability are critical.
Demonstrated ability to translate ambiguous product and platform strategy into technical designs and executable engineering plans.
Experience designing platform APIs, frameworks, or extensibility models.
Experience leading architectural initiatives through hands-on implementation and production delivery.
Experience mentoring engineers and influencing technical direction without formal management authority.
A BA/BS in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience, is preferred.
Preferred Qualifications
Deep experience in modern rendering and content delivery architectures, including server-side rendering, static generation, dynamic rendering, hydration, caching and invalidation, and the tradeoffs between rendering at the build layer, origin, edge, and client.
Experience with CDN and edge-computing platforms such as Cloudflare, Akamai, Fastly, CloudFront, or comparable technologies.
Experience with edge runtimes such as Cloudflare Workers, Akamai EdgeWorkers, Fastly Compute, or Lambda@Edge.
Familiarity with Astro, server islands, islands architecture, partial hydration, edge composition or stitching, event-driven regeneration, render-on-update patterns, and modern component architectures.
Experience designing developer platforms, rendering frameworks, compilation or build systems, component frameworks, or extensible SaaS platforms.
Experience evolving large-scale production systems while maintaining customer continuity.
Experience with AWS, observability and distributed tracing, CI/CD, infrastructure automation, and production operations, particularly when paired with the ability to evaluate architectural decisions across performance, latency, reliability, scalability, security, and cost.
Experience designing APIs or platform capabilities that can be consumed programmatically by AI systems or agents, including systems that enable the creation, composition, or modification of structured digital experiences.
Comfortable using AI-assisted engineering tools for prototyping, implementation, testing, documentation, code review, and troubleshooting while applying strong engineering judgment to both AI-assisted development and the design of AI-enabled production capabilities.
Compensation and Benefits
Wherever you are in your life or career, The Washington Post offers comprehensive and inclusive benefits for every step of your journey:
Competitive medical, dental and vision coverage
Company-paid pension and 401(k) match
Three weeks of vacation and up to three weeks of paid sick leave
Nine paid holidays and two personal days
20 weeks paid parental leave for any new parent
Robust mental health resources
Backup care and caregiver concierge services
Gender affirming services
Pet insurance
Free Post digital subscription
Leadership and career development program
Benefits may vary based on the job, full-time or part-time schedule, location, and collectively bargained status
The salary range for this position is:
$144,600 - $241,100 AnnualThe actual salary within this range will depend on individual skills, experience, and qualifications as they relate to specific job requirements. This position may be eligible for a bonus or incentive program, and a member of the Talent Acquisition team will discuss bonus payment terms and conditions during the interview process.
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