Software Engineer

Job Description:

POLITICO is seeking an experienced Software Engineer to join our Technology team in Brussels.

The way information is produced, discovered, and consumed is changing rapidly. At POLITICO, we build products that help our users understand complex political environments and make better-informed decisions. Today, that means rethinking how AI can improve access to our content and data, how our products can become smarter and more personalized, and how we build a consistent experience for our audience across our transatlantic organization.

We are looking first and foremost for a Software Engineer who can design systems, rather than a specialist in a particular language or framework. We fully embrace AI-generated code as part of modern software engineering. What matters is the ability to understand a problem, design the right system, give AI tools the right context and constraints, critically evaluate their output, and take ownership of the result.

We also believe great engineering happens through close collaboration. Being together makes it easier to exchange ideas, challenge assumptions, make decisions quickly, and solve complex problems as a team. That is why this is a Brussels-based role with a hybrid setup of four days in the office and up to one day remote.

What You’ll Do

You will join one of our transatlantic engineering teams, each with different areas of ownership across POLITICO. The team hiring for this role is currently focused on two main areas. As our products and priorities evolve, we expect engineers to evolve with them and take on new challenges.

Reinvent how our users access POLITICO intelligence

AI is changing how people discover, consume, and interact with information. You will help us explore and build new ways for our users to access POLITICO’s journalism, data, and intelligence.

You will work on systems that combine our content and data with modern AI capabilities, with a strong focus on building experiences that are useful, reliable, and worthy of our users’ trust.

This involves more than integrating models into products. You will think about how these systems are designed, how they interact with our data and services, and how we evaluate their quality and reliability.

Trust is fundamental to journalism, and the systems we build must reflect that same standard.

Build a unified audience across POLITICO

POLITICO operates across products and markets in Europe and the United States. You will help us build a more consistent understanding of our users and how they interact with POLITICO across this ecosystem.

This includes working on systems around identity, authentication, access, user preferences, and personalization, and helping simplify and consolidate how these capabilities work across our products.

The goal is to build reliable foundations that let our products recognize and serve users consistently while maintaining strong security and privacy standards.

What You’ll Need

We are looking for strong Software Engineers, not specialists in a single technology. You should be comfortable designing complex systems, moving across different parts of the stack, and choosing the right tools for the problem.

We are looking for:

• Strong software engineering and system design skills
• Experience building backend services, APIs, or distributed systems
• A solid understanding of asynchronous and event-driven architectures
• The ability to reason about security, identity, data, and integrations
• The ability to contribute to frontend applications when needed
• Experience using AI tools as part of the software development process
• The ability to evaluate generated code and systems through testing, observability, and other quality mechanisms

Additional assets include:

• Experience with AWS, serverless architectures, Terraform, or Kubernetes
• Experience with JavaScript (frontend and backend), Java, or Ruby on Rails
• Experience with identity systems and SSO/OAuth/OIDC/SAML
• Experience with LLM-powered applications, RAG, agents, search, or speech processing
• Experience building evaluation or observability systems for AI-powered applications

We do not expect you to know everything on this list. What matters most is your ability to understand complex problems, design good systems, and learn and adapt as the technology evolves.

Other Requirements

• Fluency in English; additional European languages are a plus
• Strong organizational skills and attention to detail
• Comfortable working in an international environment
• Willingness to challenge existing approaches and actively contribute to technical decisions

We value our people

Our benefits package is built for you, and includes:

• Our teams benefit from country-specific, competitive compensation and benefits packages-including pension, healthcare, training opportunities and more.
• With a multinational team, strong ties to EU institutions, and flexible work options including working from abroad, we offer our employees an environment that supports both professional and personal development.

Let’s keep in touch

You can view our list of open positions here. We hope to see your application soon!

About Us

POLITICO illuminates the forces shaping global power. Since 2007, we have delivered intelligence that anticipates tomorrow's headlines, not reports on yesterday's news. As politics has increasingly become the defining force of our era, our work has never been more vital.

Cabinet secretaries and Ministers start their mornings with our analysis. CEOs shape strategy around our reporting. Advocacy leaders rely on our insights to move policy. We deliver the straightforward facts and clear-eyed analysis they need to navigate the most complex political landscape of our lifetimes.

Our 1,100+ publishing professionals across the world's key democratic capitals-Washington, Brussels, London, Paris, Berlin, Sacramento, and New York-form the world's premier politics and policy newsroom. We tell the story of how power really works by explaining who wields it and how they plan to exercise it, connecting dots others miss and delivering scoops from sources others don't even know exist.

Innovation has always been a core tenet of our story. At launch, we bet that depth would trump scale, that talent would trump traffic, and that politics would become central to modern life. In 2011, we made another bet and launched POLITICO Pro to help decision-makers understand the business of government, transforming both how they shape government action and the business of journalism itself.

These bets have made POLITICO the most successful digital news startup of its generation and the indispensable resource for leaders who shape the future. Today, we are a rarity in media: a growing, profitable, and sustainable news organization.

POLITICO is a subsidiary of Axel Springer SE, a family-owned transatlantic media company headquartered in Berlin and New York. Axel Springer is dedicated to shaping the future of journalism in the free world, believing that a free and informed society is essential to democracy. The company’s guiding principles - first articulated as The Essentials by founder Axel Springer in the aftermath of World War II - remain a cornerstone of the company’s foundation today. Learn more about Axel Springer.

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