Senior Staff Software Engineer - Rendering & Delivery, Mediaos
About the job
- At least 8 years of experience designing, building, and operating highly scalable software systems.
- Significant experience providing technical leadership, setting technical direction, and designing architecture for complex initiatives spanning multiple systems or teams.
- Deep knowledge of modern web rendering architectures, distributed and event-driven systems, APIs, caching and content delivery, and cloud-native application design.
- Strong experience with JavaScript or TypeScript and modern web frameworks such as React, Astro, Next.js, or comparable technologies.
- Experience designing and operating high-traffic systems where performance, scalability, availability, and reliability are critical.
- Demonstrated ability to translate ambiguous product and platform strategy into technical designs and executable engineering plans.
- Experience designing platform APIs, frameworks, or extensibility models.
- Experience leading architectural initiatives through hands-on implementation and production delivery.
- Experience mentoring engineers and influencing technical direction without formal management authority.
- Lead technical design and implementation of next-generation rendering and Experience Composition capabilities.
- Design edge-rendering and edge-composition architectures, including component-level and server-island patterns, and lead the shift from TTL-driven regeneration to event-driven render-on-update models.
- Design scalable platform, rendering, and compilation APIs, and evolve component and extension architectures that enable reuse and customization without unnecessary forks.
- Help design platform capabilities and APIs that let AI systems and agents programmatically create, compose, and update pages, templates, and components.
- Define migration and interoperability strategies to evolve Rendering, Themes, and PageBuilder capabilities toward the next-generation platform while maintaining customer continuity.
- Provide senior technical leadership across Rendering, Delivery, Themes, and PageBuilder Editor, keeping decisions coherent across interconnected areas.
- Design, develop, and operate highly scalable services using TypeScript, Node.js, React, Go, AWS, and modern edge technologies.
- Lead resolution of complex production and architectural issues, and drive improvements in reliability, observability, performance, security, and cost.
- Mentor engineers through architecture discussions, design reviews, and hands-on collaboration.
- Use AI-assisted engineering tools thoughtfully for prototyping, implementation, and troubleshooting, applying strong engineering judgment to generated output.
- Deep experience in modern rendering and content delivery architectures, including server-side rendering, static generation, dynamic rendering, hydration, caching and invalidation, and tradeoffs between rendering at the build layer, origin, edge, and client.
- Experience with CDN and edge-computing platforms such as Cloudflare, Akamai, Fastly, CloudFront, or comparable technologies.
- Experience with edge runtimes such as Cloudflare Workers, Akamai EdgeWorkers, Fastly Compute, or Lambda@Edge.
- Familiarity with Astro, server islands, islands architecture, partial hydration, edge composition or stitching, event-driven regeneration, render-on-update patterns, and modern component architectures.
- Experience designing developer platforms, rendering frameworks, compilation or build systems, component frameworks, or extensible SaaS platforms.
- Experience evolving large-scale production systems while maintaining customer continuity.
- Experience with AWS, observability and distributed tracing, CI/CD, infrastructure automation, and production operations, particularly when paired with the ability to evaluate architectural decisions across performance, latency, reliability, scalability, security, and cost.
- Experience designing APIs or platform capabilities that can be consumed programmatically by AI systems or agents, including systems that enable the creation, composition, or modification of structured digital experiences.
- Comfort using AI-assisted engineering tools for prototyping, implementation, testing, documentation, code review, and troubleshooting while applying strong engineering judgment to AI-assisted development and the design of AI-enabled production capabilities.
- A BA/BS in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
About the company
Arc XP provides a content platform and operating system designed for media companies that want to grow and win. It combines AI-powered tools for generating content and personalizing reader experiences with automation to handle low-value workflows. This enables editorial teams to focus on high-value work while delivering highly personalized experiences that turn casual readers into subscribers and fans. The platform is built on scalable, extensible infrastructure so media companies can move faster and innovate without limits. Arc XP differentiates itself by combining a unified, end-to-end platform with AI-driven content and audience personalization, backed by experience from The Washington Post. The company’s goal is to help media organizations own their audiences, run smarter, and outpace competitors by achieving aggressive, technology-driven growth.
Company Size
51-200
Company Stage
N/A
Total Funding
N/A
Headquarters
Chicago, Illinois
Founded
2016
Get referred to Arc XP
See people who can refer or advise you
Simplify's Take
What believers are saying
- Compass reached general availability in September 2026, expanding Arc XP's monetizable product line.
- Ask The News launched July 2026, capturing first-party intent publishers lose to ChatGPT.
- Tickaroo and TollBit partnerships add live-blogging and AI-bot monetization for RND and others.
What critics are saying
- Reuters Institute 2026 says social and video now beat publishers' own sites globally.
- Arc XP's products defend against AI platforms because referrals from search and chat are collapsing.
- If Washington Post owner cuts investment by 2027, Arc XP loses its proving ground.
What makes Arc XP unique
- Built inside The Washington Post, Arc XP ships newsroom-tested workflows and governance.
- Compass, launched September 21, 2026, keeps editors controlling personalization priorities.
- It powers 3,000-plus sites and works across any CMS or delivery stack.
Help us improve and share your feedback! Did you find this helpful?
Benefits
- Health Insurance
- Dental Insurance
- Vision Insurance
- 401(k) Company Match
- Paid Vacation
- Paid Sick Leave
- Paid Holidays
- Parental Leave
- Mental Health Support
- Wellness Program
- Elder Care Support
- Pet Insurance
Company News
Arc XP launches Compass: A home page that knows who's reading it, and a newsroom that still decides what leads. Sep 21, 2026, 08:59 ET Arc XP Compass recognizes a returning reader, remembers what they read last, and shows them what they missed. Editors still decide what leads. WASHINGTON, Sept. 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ - Arc XP, the media technology platform built inside The Washington Post, launched Arc XP Compass, a personalization engine for news home pages and section fronts. Arc XP Compass tells a returning reader from a first-time one, remembers what each read last, and rebuilds the page around it. It is the experience Instagram and TikTok trained a generation to expect, applied to news. The difference is who sets the priorities: editors still decide what leads. Publishers just crossed a threshold. Social media and video networks have, for the first time, overtaken publishers' own websites and apps as the most common way people get news, used by 54% of respondents across 48 markets against 51% for news organizations' own sites and apps, according to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism's Digital News Report 2026. Catch Me Up is the clearest example. A wildfire breaks out Monday, and a reader follows the first evacuation orders that night. She is off the news for three days. By Thursday, the story has moved four times: containment lines held, two neighborhoods cleared to return, the county opened an investigation into the local utility, the casualty count revised. Arc XP Compass knows she was here and where she stopped, and opens with a recap of what changed while she was gone, in order, built from the newsroom's own reporting rather than a generated summary. A first-time visitor sees none of it. Behind that summary, every update on the fire sits in a single storyline called Dynamic Timelines, instead of scattering across a dozen separate links. Editors keep their hands on the wheel: Editorial Priority Controls lets them pin, boost, or bury any story directly, so the personalization never drifts from the newsroom's own judgment. The pressure is concentrated among younger readers. Among 18-to-24-year-olds, 52% now name social media, video networks or AI chatbots as their main way of getting news, 32 points ahead of the next source. Publishers' own sites and apps are no longer the main source of news for any age group globally. Ten percent worldwide used a standalone AI chatbot for news last week, up from 7% a year earlier, and 16% among under-35s. Referral traffic is fragile too: Google Discover traffic to Reach, the UK's largest commercial news publisher, fell 46% in the second half of 2025, per the company's investor disclosure. A general-purpose chatbot cannot replicate what a newsroom builds over years: an editorial voice, a reader's trust, and an archive of its own reporting. Global trust in answers from AI chatbots sits at 20%, against 37% for news overall. Arc XP calls the approach adaptive discovery. Arc XP Compass is platform-agnostic. It works with any content management system or delivery stack, whether or not a newsroom runs the rest of its site on the Arc XP hybrid CMS platform. "Publishers don't want to hand their relationship with readers over to somebody else's algorithm. They want a better version of their own front page," said Ryan Gladstone, Director of Product Engineering, Arc XP. "Arc XP Compass lets a newsroom's priorities guide the experience while still meeting each reader where they left off. A chatbot can't do that, and a generic recommendation engine won't respect the newsroom." Availability Arc XP Compass is generally available beginning September 2026. To view a short video of Arc XP Compass, please visit: https://hubs.la/Q04xNZX50 About Arc XP Arc XP is the platform for modern media, built inside The Washington Post, which still runs on it today. Newsrooms, digital publishers, and broadcasters use Arc XP to publish faster, own their audience relationships, and diversify revenue, including The Irish Times, Libération, L'Express, Madsack, Graham Media Group, and Sky News. Arc Intelligence grounds AI in each organization's own content and governance rules, so editors stay in control of what is published. Arc XP supports more than 3,000 sites worldwide, with a migration path proven by publishers who've already made the move. Learn more at www.arcxp.com. Sources for cited statistics: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Digital News Report 2026 (reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/digital-news-report/2026). Reach figure as reported by Press Gazette, 3 March 2026, and cited in the same report. SOURCE Arc XP
Arc XP, the media technology platform built inside The Washington Post, has launched Arc XP Compass, a personalisation engine for news home pages and section fronts. The tool recognises returning readers, remembers what they have read, and rebuilds the page around their history whilst allowing editors to maintain control over editorial priorities. The launch comes as social media and video networks have overtaken publishers' own websites and apps as the most common way people access news. According to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism's Digital News Report 2026, 54% of respondents across 48 markets now use social platforms, compared to 51% using news organisations' own sites. Arc XP Compass features include "Catch Me Up", which recaps story developments readers missed, and Dynamic Timelines, which consolidates updates into single storylines. The platform is content-management-system agnostic and generally available from September 2026.
Publishers are losing their readers to AI. The Washington Post's tech arm built a solution. Jul 13, 2026, 09:01 ET Arc XP launches Ask The News, giving news publishers a way to answer reader questions with their own journalism - and keep the audience data, conversions, and revenue that AI platforms are quietly capturing. WASHINGTON, July 13, 2026 /PRNewswire/ - Every day, millions of readers who once visited a news site now get their answers from ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google's AI Overviews - without the publisher seeing a single pageview, collecting a data point, or earning a cent. Arc XP, the media operating system built by The Washington Post, is launching a product designed to stop that. New data underscore the urgency. According to the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2026 (published June 2026), only 4% of AI chatbot users say they always or often click through to original news sources - compared to 19% from search. As readers migrate their questions to AI, publishers are watching referral traffic go with them. Ask The News is an AI-powered answer layer that publishers embed directly on their own digital properties. When a reader has a question, Ask The News answers it using the publisher's own reporting - with attribution, editorial guardrails, and guards against the open-web hallucination risk that defines generic AI tools. The publisher owns the interaction, the intent data it generates, and every business opportunity that flows from it. "The industry has spent years worrying about Google and social platforms. The next threat is quieter and faster: readers learning to ask AI instead of visiting a news site. Ask The News puts publishers back in that conversation," said Joey Marburger, Vice President of Content Intelligence, Arc XP. "The question is whether publishers own that moment of reader curiosity, or whether someone else does." For decades, the article has been the primary unit of digital news engagement. Ask The News introduces a new layer built around the reader's question. Rather than requiring audiences to scan headlines or leave a publisher's site to understand a story, Ask The News surfaces relevant questions, allows readers to ask follow-ups, and synthesizes answers from the publisher's own journalism. The product automatically declines to answer when there is insufficient source reporting to do so confidently - a guardrail that sharply distinguishes it from general-purpose AI tools. "Ask The News has the potential to change how audiences experience our journalism," said Martin Kautz, Head of Media Technologies at RND - RedaktionsNetzwerk Deutschland. "It gives readers a more intuitive way to explore our reporting while helping us preserve control of the reader relationship and better understand what people want to know." The product launches with three core capabilities. Conversational Embeds allow publishers to deploy Ask The News across articles, homepages, and apps, with auto-generated suggested questions and a natural-language interface grounded in the publisher's reporting. A Subscription Gateway meters answers rather than articles, presenting a conversion prompt after a reader has already received value - a higher-intent moment than a traditional paywall. And Contextual Advertising with IAB Topic Intelligence classifies reader questions and answers in real time, generating intent-level signals that route through a publisher's existing ad stack without surrendering audience data to a third party. "Search shows links. Generic AI gives answers from the open web. Ask The News answers with a publisher's journalism, rules, and business model," Marburger added. "This is about building a durable reader habit: when you have a question, you go to your trusted news organization first." Ask The News is now available to Arc XP publisher partners, with a standalone deployment for non-Arc XP publishers via a JavaScript embed. Arc XP plans to expand the product into a broader intelligence platform, with future capabilities including personalized briefings, saved conversations, topic tracking, editorial intelligence dashboards, and proactive reader experiences. Link to 1-minute video demonstrating Ask The News functionality: https://hubs.la/Q04p95kY0 About Arc XP Arc XP is the content platform and operating system built to power growth for ambitious media companies. Developed by The Washington Post, Arc XP is used by leading media organizations worldwide, including The Irish Times, Libération, L'Express, Madsack, Graham Media Group, and Sky News. Arc XP's platform helps media companies innovate rapidly, own audience relationships, and grow independent revenue. Arc XP supports more than 3,000 sites globally and delivers billions of pageviews each month. Learn more at www.arcxp.com. SOURCE Arc XP
Arc XP and Tickaroo partner to bring live blogging workflows to media organizations. June 8, 2026 2 min. read New Power Up integration enables Arc XP customers to embed Tickaroo live blogs into the Arc XP media operating platform. Arc XP announced a partnership with Tickaroo, a live blogging platform trusted by hundreds of newsrooms worldwide. The partnership enables Arc XP customers to embed Tickaroo live blogs directly into the Arc XP platform through a custom Power Up integration. The integration gives editorial teams a streamlined way to deliver real-time coverage for breaking news, sports, elections, live events, and developing stories. By bringing Tickaroo's live blogging capabilities into the Arc XP platform, publishers can manage live coverage within existing publishing workflows while improving speed, flexibility, and audience engagement. "Arc XP is focused on helping media organizations build stronger, more sustainable digital businesses, and that starts with giving newsrooms tools that make their work faster, simpler, and more impactful," said Sharad Vivek, Head of Partnerships at Arc XP. "Tickaroo shares our belief that technology should simplify editorial workflows, not complicate them. This partnership gives our customers a practical way to deliver high-quality live coverage while keeping their teams focused on reporting, audience engagement, and growth." Tickaroo helps news, sports, and media organizations deliver real-time stories that build trust, grow audiences, and create new monetization opportunities. Its platform supports live news coverage, sports reporting, major events, multimedia storytelling, AI-powered workflows, and distributed newsroom collaboration. "Live coverage has become one of the most important ways publishers build connection and trust with their audiences and drive sustainable revenue at the same time," said Naomi Owusu, CEO and Co-Founder of Tickaroo. "By partnering with Arc XP, we are making it easier for media organizations to bring real-time storytelling into their existing publishing environments. Together, we can help newsrooms work more efficiently, engage audiences more deeply, and create new opportunities for sustainable growth." RND, a shared customer of Arc XP and Tickaroo, has successfully used Tickaroo for nearly a decade. "Real-time coverage is central to how we serve audiences across fast-moving news and events. The combination of Arc XP and Tickaroo gives our teams a more integrated way to publish live updates, streamline workflows, and keep readers engaged when stories are developing quickly," said Martin Kautz, Head of Media Technologies, RND RedaktionsNetzwerk Deutschland.
Arc XP has partnered with Tickaroo to bring live blogging capabilities to media organisations through a Power Up integration. The partnership enables Arc XP customers to embed Tickaroo live blogs directly into their publishing workflows for real-time coverage of breaking news, sports, elections and live events. Tickaroo, founded in 2011, serves over 450 newsrooms worldwide with its live blogging platform, which features AI-powered workflows and multimedia integration. The collaboration aims to help publishers manage live coverage whilst improving speed and audience engagement. RND RedaktionsNetzwerk Deutschland, a shared customer, has used Tickaroo for nearly a decade. Arc XP supports more than 2,500 sites globally, delivering billions of pageviews monthly. The integration allows editorial teams to deliver real-time content without disrupting existing publishing processes.