Lead Software Engineer

America's Test Kitchen is looking for a Lead Software Engineer to join our Retention Zone and lead the charge on bringing AI into our subscription products and to drive subscriber value by delivering new experiences. This is a hands-on individual contributor role for someone who can identify where AI creates real subscriber value, architect the right approach, work with Product to prioritize and build it, while raising the bar for how the broader engineering team thinks about and works with AI. You won't just advise. You'll prototype, ship, and iterate on AI features that make a tangible difference to our subscribers, working shoulder-to-shoulder with our Content Engagement and Search & Discovery product teams to make it happen.

Responsibilities

• Identify the highest-leverage opportunities to embed AI into our products — from intelligent content recommendations and personalization to smarter search and completely new experiences that add value to our subscribers.
• Partner closely with the Product Managers for Content Engagement and Search & Discovery to shape roadmaps, define AI-driven features, and ensure technical approaches align with subscriber and business goals.
• Design and build AI-powered features end-to-end: data pipelines, model integration, APIs, and the product surfaces that subscribers interact with.
• Prototype quickly, validate with real usage, and iterate toward production-quality solutions.
• Establish the teams AI engineering practices — evaluation frameworks, prompt management, fine-tuning approaches, observability, and responsible AI guardrails.
• Partner with subscriber success to ensure AI features solve genuine subscriber problems and drive measurable outcomes.
• Act as a technical force multiplier for the broader engineering org — reviewing AI-related work, mentoring engineers, and sharing knowledge across teams.
• Stay close to the rapidly evolving AI landscape and bring the right tools and techniques in at the right time.

Qualifications

• 7 years of software engineering experience, with at least 2 years focused on shipping AI/ML features in production.
• Deep familiarity with LLMs and modern AI tooling — prompt engineering, RAG, function calling, fine-tuning, vector databases, and agentic frameworks.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals: system design, APIs, scalable data pipelines, and clean, maintainable code.
• Experience owning AI features from concept through production and measuring their real-world impact.
• A collaborative working style — comfortable partnering with product managers to translate customer needs into technical solutions.
• Ability to communicate technical tradeoffs clearly to non-engineering stakeholders.

Required Skills

• Prior experience in a lead IC role at a SaaS company.
• Experience applying AI to content engagement, search relevance, or personalization problems.
• Familiarity with AI safety, evaluation, and responsible AI best practices.
• Background in a media domain.

Preferred Skills

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent professional experience.
• Proven experience working on high-traffic, customer-facing web applications and applying AI technologies in consumer online products.
• A passion for continuous learning and a "test and learn" mindset.

Why Americas Test Kitchen:

We are passionate about cooking, and about creating the best place to work. We are small enough for your ideas to make a big impact, and large enough to offer you opportunities to grow

professionally at any stage of your career. We want you to take risks and make mistakes,

that's how innovation happens in our test kitchen, in our offices, and in life.

We at America's Test Kitchen believe food media can be a powerful force for social change. We are passionate about building an inclusive workforce that represents many different cultures, backgrounds, abilities, identities, and perspectives.