Principal Data Engineer

Job Title: Principal Data Engineer
Location: Hybrid (NYC-based)
Experience: 8+ years

The Mission

Architect the real-time data backbone for 52 brands and 38M users. You will enable millisecond-latency experiences at scale, powering personalized feeds, live user scoring, and next-best-action models across 62M+ monthly page views.

About Hearst Newspapers

Hearst Newspapers (HNP) is a leading media organization that powers the next generation of consumer news products. As part of Hearst Corporation, one of America's largest diversified media companies, HNP employs over 2,500 professionals across more than 75 brands in a national network. 

While HNP's reach is national, its focus is local. The company is committed to being the most trusted, respected, and accurate source of news and information in the communities it serves. HNP's comprehensive portfolio includes innovative digital products, data-driven journalism, and specialized businesses such as King Features Syndicate, Hearst DevHub, and StoryStudio.

The company is investing heavily in data engineering and machine learning to power next-generation news products while maintaining its core commitment to high-quality journalism that informs and connects communities across the country.

The Role

This is not a ticket-taking role. As a Principal Data Engineer, you will own the architectural standard for our entire data ecosystem. You will partner directly with the VP of Data and Senior Data Scientists to transform our batch-heavy legacy systems into a modern, event-driven platform capable of real-time decision-making.

What You’ll Do (Strategic Leadership)

• Architect for Massive Scale: Design the ingestion and serving layers for 38M MAU, moving beyond simple ETL to build low-latency pipelines that handle high-concurrency inference requests.
• Define the Engineering Standard: You will set the bar for the team, leading code reviews and mentoring engineers to ensure reliability is baked in, not patched on.
• Solve the "Real-Time" Problem: You will architect the serving layer for our ML models (Recommendation Engines, Churn Prediction), solving complex latency challenges to deliver predictions during active user sessions.

• Modernize the Stack (Multi-Cloud Strategy): You will drive the "Buy vs. Build" decisions that shape our future, integrating best-in-class tools into our primary GCP ecosystem. You have the autonomy to retire technical debt in favor of modern, efficient frameworks like Daft, Flink, or Spark, and the ability to stick to the GCP ecosystem of leverage AWS (e.g. Sagemaker, Bedrock, AgentCore) if it’s the best tool for the job.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of engineering experience, with a proven track record of architecting data platforms that scale beyond single-server limits.

• Production MLOps Expertise: You have built "paved roads" for deploying ML models. You understand the lifecycle of a model from training to real-time serving and monitoring.

• Multi-Cloud Fluency: You are comfortable architecting solutions that span ecosystems (e.g., orchestrating Airflow on GCP while leveraging specific AWS AI services).

• Mastery of Modern Data Tools: Deep proficiency in Python and SQL is a given. You bring expertise in orchestration (Airflow/Dagster), streaming (Kafka/PubSub/Flink), and modern compute frameworks (Spark/Ray/Daft).

• Leadership without "Management": You want to remain a high-leverage Individual Contributor who leads through architecture and code, rather than managing people and spreadsheets.

Why Join Us

• Impact & Ownership: You’ll shape our company’s data roadmap and have tangible influence on mission-critical products.
• Collaborative Culture: We value teamwork and constant learning, no one is above the details.
• Hybrid Work Environment: Enjoy the flexibility of working from home while still connecting in-person with a NYC-based team.
• Growth Opportunities: We invest in our talent and encourage continuous professional development.

If you are ready to define the architecture for a national media network, we’d love to hear from you. Apply today to join our team in NYC!

Our Benefits: At Hearst Newspapers we not only support our employees through personal and professional development, but we also believe in promoting each individual’s physical, financial and emotional wellbeing (and that of their family).  Our industry-leading benefits include:

• Physical Wellbeing: Medical, Dental, and Vision coverage to keep you and your family healthy.
• Invest for the Future: Competitive retirement plan with matching program in most markets.
• Generous Paid Time Off: Recharge with ample time off, including holidays and vacation.
• Paid Parental Leave: Support for growing families, with paid leave for new parents.
• Monthly Child & Dependent Care Reimbursement: Financial support for the care of your loved ones.
• Emotional Wellbeing: Be your best self with our mental wellness benefits.
• LGBTQ+ & Inclusive Health Services: Inclusive healthcare designed for every individual’s unique needs.
• Fertility Coverage & Menopause Support: Helping you along every step of your family journey.
• Pet Wellness Reimbursement & Rover Credits: We care about your pets, too – helping you keep them happy and healthy.
• And more, click here for additional benefits and details.

The base salary for this role is between $220,000-$250,000. The actual base pay offered is dependent upon many factors, such as: transferable skills, work experience, business needs and market demands. The base pay range is subject to change and may be modified in the future.