Senior Full Stack Software Engineer, Subscriptions DevOps

Join the future of news We’re on a mission to deliver riveting storytelling for all of America. At The Washington Post, you’ll help reinvent news. Our work is driven by a deep investigative spirit and enhanced by innovation to bring audiences closer to the stories that matter most. About Our Team The Washington Post is powered by the passion and talent of our people. It takes all of us to reinvent news. Beyond our award-winning News and Opinions teams, we work across many departments, including Brand & Events, Communications, Customer Care, Engineering & Product, Finance, Human Resources, Legal, Marketing & Advertising, Print Operations, and Sales. Why This Role Matters   We are looking for a Senior Full Stack Engineer to join the Subscriptions team at The Washington Post. This role spans the full application stack with a strong emphasis on the cloud infrastructure, delivery systems, and operational practices that keep our subscription products reliable and scalable. As a senior engineer, you will take ownership of complex technical work, contribute to architectural decisions, and help improve how the team builds, deploys, and operates software. The ideal candidate brings deep expertise in AWS, CI/CD, cloud infrastructure, and production operations, along with strong application development experience in Java - our primary backend language - and Node.js, and familiarity with React. We value autonomy, initiative, strong communication, and meaningful day-to-day use of AI-assisted engineering tools, including continually finding new ways to apply AI to development, automation, operations, and team effectiveness. What Motivates You Strong sense of ownership and accountability for both the software you build and the systems that run it. Passionate about reliable, scalable systems and making software delivery faster, safer, and more repeatable. Proactive and comfortable driving complex work with a high degree of autonomy. Comfortable moving across application code, AWS infrastructure, CI/CD, developer tooling, and production operations. Actively uses AI in day-to-day engineering and continually looks for ways to expand its impact on development, automation, operations, and productivity. Enjoys collaborating across teams, mentoring others, and communicating technical decisions clearly upward and sideways. How You'll Support the Mission Design, build, test, deploy, and operate applications and services supporting our subscription products. Own technical solutions throughout their lifecycle, from design and implementation through deployment, observability, production support, and continuous improvement. Design and maintain scalable, reliable AWS infrastructure using services such as ECS, Lambda, S3, RDS, IAM, CloudWatch, and related technologies. Build and evolve Infrastructure as Code, with experience using AWS CDK strongly valued. Design, maintain, and continuously improve CI/CD pipelines, deployment automation, and developer workflows. Configure, operate, troubleshoot, and improve self-hosted engineering platforms such as Jenkins, Airflow, and similar systems. Develop backend services and APIs primarily using Java, with Node.js used across supporting services, automation, and tooling. Contribute to frontend applications built with React and modern JavaScript/TypeScript when needed. Build automation that reduces operational overhead and improves the reliability and repeatability of development and production processes. Establish strong observability and diagnose complex issues spanning applications, infrastructure, deployment pipelines, and third-party integrations. Participate in the team’s on-call rotation, taking ownership of incident diagnosis, mitigation, communication, and systemic follow-up. Identify technical debt, operational bottlenecks, and opportunities for improvement and proactively drive solutions. Communicate technical decisions, risks, tradeoffs, and progress clearly to engineering peers, leadership, product partners, and adjacent teams. Mentor engineers and contribute to technical standards, architecture discussions, documentation, and engineering best practices. Use AI extensively throughout the engineering lifecycle and identify opportunities to apply it to development, infrastructure, troubleshooting, automation, incident investigation, and operational workflows. The Skills and Experience You Bring Minimum Qualifications BA/BS in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience. 5+ years of hands-on AWS experience, including designing, deploying, operating, and troubleshooting production workloads. 4+ years of experience with CI/CD, deployment automation, and Infrastructure as Code in production environments. 3+ years of backend development experience with Java, including building and operating production services and APIs. Java is the team’s primary backend language. 2+ years of professional experience with Node.js, including services, automation, developer tooling, or infrastructure tooling. Experience administering and operating self-hosted engineering platforms such as Jenkins, Airflow, or similar technologies in production environments. Strong understanding of cloud architecture, networking, IAM, security, scalability, reliability, and operational best practices. Experience building and maintaining Infrastructure as Code using AWS CDK, CloudFormation, Terraform, or comparable technologies. Experience with containerized workloads and services such as Docker and ECS. Strong production operations and observability experience, including logs, metrics, tracing, dashboards, alerting, and troubleshooting across applications and infrastructure. Experience supporting business-critical systems through an on-call rotation, incident response, and post-incident remediation. Strong software engineering fundamentals and the ability to contribute to application code when needed. Demo