Software Engineer

📋 Description

• • Join NPR’s award-winning engineering team and help build the digital products that bring trusted journalism to more than 50 million listeners, readers, and viewers every month. As a Software Engineer you will design, develop, and scale the systems that power NPR.org, the NPR One app, live audio streams, podcasts, smart-speaker experiences, and the APIs that syndicate our content to partners around the globe.
• • Work in small, cross-functional squads alongside product managers, designers, journalists, and audio producers to ship features that deepen audience engagement and expand public-service journalism. Recent launches you could have influenced include personalized podcast playlists, real-time election results dashboards, and an accessibility-first audio player that serves millions of concurrent users during breaking-news events.
• • Own the full development lifecycle—from discovery and architecture through coding, automated testing, deployment, and observability—using modern cloud-native stacks on AWS (EKS, Lambda, DynamoDB, S3, CloudFront) and languages such as TypeScript, Python, Go, and Kotlin. You will write clean, well-tested, and well-documented code that meets NPR’s high standards for performance, security, and maintainability.
• • Champion continuous delivery and DevOps best practices. You’ll configure CI/CD pipelines in GitHub Actions, instrument services with Datadog, and participate in blameless post-mortems that turn incidents into learning opportunities. Expect to deploy to production multiple times a day with confidence.
• • Contribute to NPR’s open-source initiatives and technical blog posts. We maintain popular libraries for audio streaming, accessibility, and content syndication; your work here will be visible to—and used by—the wider journalism and civic-tech communities.
• • Collaborate with data scientists and editorial analytics teams to instrument user-behavior events, run A/B tests, and translate data into actionable product insights. Your code will directly influence how NPR recommends stories, personalizes audio feeds, and surfaces under-represented voices.
• • Participate in an inclusive, remote-first culture that values psychological safety, mentorship, and continuous learning. You’ll pair program with senior engineers, lead “lunch-and-learn” sessions on emerging technologies, and help shape our engineering standards and style guides.
• • Rotate through an on-call schedule that respects work-life balance—our pager-duty rotation averages one week every eight weeks, with follow-the-sun support from teams on both coasts. We compensate on-call duty with extra paid time off and a generous incident-response bonus.
• • Influence NPR’s long-term technical strategy by evaluating new frameworks, cloud services, and architectural patterns. Recent explorations include edge-computing with Cloudflare Workers, real-time audio transcription with Whisper, and server-side rendering for ultra-fast page loads on low-bandwidth connections.
• • Uphold NPR’s mission to create a more informed public. Every line of code you write supports fact-based journalism, diverse storytelling, and equitable access to information for audiences regardless of geography, income, or device.