Job Description
About the Team (Hearst E-Commerce)
Hearst E-commerce is a newly formed organization focused on developing and supporting E-Commerce across Hearst's consumer media portfolio. Our goal is to make it easier 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, 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 inspiring opportunities, to our corporate donation matching.
Your Impact
The E-Commerce platform team develops a variety of tools for use by Hearst's collection of publications and stations, as well as new prototypes of new and emerging commerce concepts. Our team works across the entire stack that supports marketplaces and other buying experiences across our media sites. As these experiences grow, we are beginning to expand our advertising products to support commerce-specific experiences. These new products will be a hybrid of retail media offerings common to retailers with traditional performance-based display advertising present in our retail media offerings.
As a new organization beginning to scale our technical team, we are looking for experienced senior engineers who can assume responsibility for the design and implementation of our emerging ad-tech. Your role will be to partner with other engineers and product teams from within our organization and outside to help execute our technical strategy for a retail media offering intended to reach every Hearst reader and shopper across all the platforms we publish content. We anticipate a hybrid of both internal and third-party services and are looking for technical experience capable of making thoughtful decisions and building scalable ad-tech solutions.
You will work closely with other engineers in the team building our new ad-tech products, and partner closely with multiple platform teams, as well as our data and analytics teams to ensure that we can use the entire spectrum of user interactions to improve the quality and relevancy of our products.
Since we are in the early stages of building our ad platform, you will be one of the founding members of the team, and you will have the opportunity to develop brand new components from scratch. Your hands-on coding will span developing prototype applications, as well as production code. An ardent desire to learn, work in ambiguously defined product areas, and partner with others is important.
Your Day-to-Day

• Develop and maintain our scalable Ads platform, including the backend systems and their corresponding control panels across Hearst.
• Implement new features in collaboration with our product and design teams using a combination of internally developed and third-party solutions.
• Employ clean code, simple design, good documentation practices and write reusable and scalable libraries for use across other engineering teams as needed.
• Integrate and use the right testing practices across different development and deployment stages.
• Help audit and provide constructive criticism for designs and implementations and be open minded to receive feedback.
• Partner with our operations teams to deploy and scale the services that we build.
• Design and build with security in mind from the beginning and speak up for any security concerns.
• Be willing to provide help for your colleagues and to ask for help when you need it.
• 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. We encourage all candidates with some applicable qualifications to apply.

• 6 years of experience building scalable and highly available backend systems in one or more programming languages (at least one of Java, Python or NodeJS are required).
• A knowledge of how to scale a small experiment (hundreds of concurrent users) to web-scale audiences (hundreds of thousands of concurrent users).
• Excellent knowledge of monolithic and microservice architecture, cloud-based solutions, preferably AWS, Azure, or GCP.
• Solid understanding of RESTful APIs and experience in developing them
• In-depth knowledge of database technologies like MySQL, NoSQL, Graph databases and the ability to identify and rework database performance issues.
• Knowledge of best practices for CI/CD, observability, and instrumentation in a complex microservice environment.
• Excellent critical thinking and debugging skills.
• Experience working with data engineering teams to help stream data to off-application analytical tools.
• A bachelor's degree in a technical field or equivalent real-life experience.

Good to Have

• Previous Ad-Tech development experience, specifically with one or more of the following - Developing programmatic ad tags; integrations with prebid, Google Ad Manager or any other ad servers; building and designing scalable ad serving systems; building attribution tags and scalable attribution endpoints; understanding of programmatic ad serving internals and workflows; design and build asset management and distribution systems including caching and CDNs; building or tuning AI-based targeting & recommender systems; experience with using CQEngine or Elastic Search for storing targeting data.
• Practical understanding of AI tools, Machine Learning algorithms and NLP.
• Experience with an at-scale (>$500MM GMV annually) E-commerce site (marketplace or retailer) that sells directly to consumers.
• In-depth knowledge in several (but not necessarily all) core design areas, including persistence, messaging, protocols, distributed systems, event driven architecture, cloud architecture, security, and mobile applications.

In accordance with applicable law, Hearst is required to include a reasonable estimate of the compensation for this role if hired in New York State. The reasonable estimate, if hired in New York State, is $178,000-$220,000. Please note this information is specific to those hired in New York State. If this role is open to candidates outside of New York State, the salary range would be aligned to that specific location. A final decision on the successful candidate's starting salary will be based on a number of permissible, non-discriminatory factors, including but not limited to skills and experience, training, certifications, and education. Hearst provides a competitive benefits package, including medical, dental, vision, disability and life insurance, 401(k), paid holidays and paid time off, employee assistance programs, and more.
In accordance with applicable law, Hearst is required to include a reasonable estimate of the compensation for this role if hired in New York City. The reasonable estimate, if hired in New York City, is $178,000-$220,000. Please note this information is specific to those hired in New York City. If this role is open to candidates outside of New York City, the salary range would be aligned to that specific location. A final decision on the successful candidate's starting salary will be based on a number of permissible, non-discriminatory factors, including but not limited to skills and experience, training, certifications, and education. Hearst provides a competitive benefits package, including medical, dental, vision, disability and life insurance, 401(k), paid holidays and paid time off, employee assistance programs, and more.
In accordance with applicable law, Hearst is required to include a reasonable estimate of the compensation for this role if hired in Washington. The reasonable estimate, if hired in Washington, is $178,000-$220,000. Please note this information is specific to those hired in Washington. If this role is open to candidates outside of Washington, the salary range would be aligned to that specific location. A final decision on the successful candidate's starting salary will be based on a number of permissible, non-discriminatory factors, including but not limited to skills and experience, training, certifications, and education. Hearst provides a competitive benefits package, including medical, dental, vision, disability and life insurance, 401(k), paid time off (including 10 paid holidays, 15 days paid vacation, three personal days, and seven days of paid sick time), employee assistance programs, and more.
About Us
Hearst is one of the nation's largest global, diversified information, services and media companies.
Hearst has been innovating for more than a century, leading with purpose, integrity and a culture of care, with a mission to inform audiences and improve lives.
The company's diverse portfolio includes global financial services leader Fitch Group; Hearst Health, a group of medical information and services businesses; Hearst Transportation, which includes CAMP Systems International, a major provider of software-as-a-service solutions for managing maintenance of jets and helicopters; ownership in cable television networks such as A&E, HISTORY, Lifetime and ESPN; 35 television stations; 24 daily and 52 weekly newspapers; digital services businesses; and more than 200 magazines around the world.
Hearst is always moving forward, investing in healthcare solutions to improve patient outcomes and technology that curbs emissions; providing vital analysis, data and software to the global financial services industry; delivering important service and investigative journalism; and inspiring audiences with sports and entertainment programming.
With a commitment to maintaining the highest quality in its products and services, Hearst is dedicated to serving the communities it operates in, both civically and philanthropically.
Hearst is an Equal Employment Opportunity employer. We do not discriminate in hiring on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, creed, sex or gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, age, physical or mental disability, military or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local law.