Editorial Director, Newsroom Engineering

Job Description:

We’re at an inflection point: AI is reshaping how audiences find, consume, and interact with news. POLITICO’s advantage remains our original reporting, our judgment, and our distinct voice. But to protect and extend that advantage we need the newsroom at the center of innovation — moving faster, experimenting more boldly, and turning pilots into reliable infrastructure rather than one-off demos.

We want to invest in a newsroom team so that we can move from quarterly experiments to shipping AI features every couple of weeks, and building POLITICO-specific models that competitors can’t replicate. We also want to invest knowledge and technical thinking in our newsroom to more closely connect our journalism with our innovative product building.

POLITICO is seeking an editorial-minded technical leader to lead this team and serve as our Editorial Director, Newsroom Engineering. This role will be a player-coach who turns newsroom priorities into tools, workflows, and platforms that help our reporters and editors move faster without sacrificing accuracy or voice.

You’ll run team’s agile rituals; personally review high-risk pull requests; evaluate outcomes; and contribute code. In 2026, the team’s mandate is to help every desk leverage AI and other new technologies in practical, novel ways. Adoption and impact are the bar for success with KPIs measured by minutes saved, time-to-publish, quality preserved, and active usage. You’ll also be responsible for translating editorial priorities into a living roadmap. You’ll identify use cases and opportunities for workflow improvements by staying connected to newsroom priorities and fostering relationships with editors and reporters

Who You Are:

A successful Editorial Director at POLITICO exhibits empathy, a collaborative spirit, and tenacity to solve root causes — not just symptoms. If you align with our mission of empowering newsrooms through technology and believe you can increase our impact, please apply. We’re excited to meet you!

What You’ll Do:

• Communicate a clear vision for creating and implementing AI-powered newsroom tools that practically meet journalist’s needs – pushing the boundaries on what’s possible with our original reporting and unique voice while maintaining editorial standards
• Provide a nurturing, team-oriented environment by fostering continuous learning, experimentation, and skill development for a team of full-stack developers and engineers
• Collaborate with cross-company product leaders, audience experts, and newsrooms in both the US and EU to prioritize high-impact work
• Own agile rituals for task intake, backlog triage, sprint planning, stand-ups, demos, retros, and a visible release calendar
• Set engineering standards for various coding teams across our newsroom, and personally review high-stakes PRs across multiple teams to protect reliability, performance, and editorial quality
• Monitor engineering capacity and skills, manage hiring and onboarding, and collaborate on staffing to maximize business value

What You’ll Need:

• Proven experience with modern front-end frameworks (Typescript/React/Vue) and back-end stacks (Node/Python)
• Fluency as a technical leader planning/designing software with a team of engineers as well as providing a solid foundation of feedback through code review, modern QA methodology, and individual goal setting
• Experience deploying event-driven microservices across serverless platforms (AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions/Cloud Run, Azure Functions) using Infrastructure-as-Code paradigms (Terraform/CloudFormation)
• Track record leveraging novel technologies (like AI) to solve real problems for reporters and editors
• Strong written and spoken communication with an ability to translate editorial standards and audience goals into product and engineering requirements
• Experience with advanced data structures (taxonomies, vector databases, knowledge graphs) and Agile or modified-Agile environments is a plus.

We value our people. Click here for more on what we offer and what it’s like to work for POLITICO.

Let’s keep in touch. You can view our list of open positions here. We hope to see your application soon!

About Us.

POLITICO illuminates the forces shaping global power. Since 2007, we have delivered intelligence that anticipates tomorrow's headlines, not reports on yesterday's news. As politics has increasingly become the defining force of our era, our work has never been more vital.

Cabinet secretaries and Ministers start their mornings with our analysis. CEOs shape strategy around our reporting. Advocacy leaders rely on our insights to move policy. We deliver the straightforward facts and clear-eyed analysis they need to navigate the most complex political landscape of our lifetimes.

Our 1,100+ publishing professionals across the world's key democratic capitals—Washington, Brussels, London, Paris, Berlin, Sacramento, and New York—form the world's premier politics and policy newsroom. We tell the story of how power really works by explaining who wields it and how they plan to exercise it, connecting dots others miss and delivering scoops from sources others don't even know exist.

Innovation has always been a core tenet of our story. At launch, we bet that depth would trump scale, that talent would trump traffic, and that politics would become central to modern life. In 2011, we made another bet and launched POLITICO Pro to help decision-makers understand the business of government, transforming both how they shape government action and the business of journalism itself.

These bets have made POLITICO the most successful digital news startup of its generation and the indispensable resource for leaders who shape the future. Today, we are a rarity in media: a growing, profitable, and sustainable news organization.

POLITICO is a subsidiary of Axel Springer SE, a family-owned transatlantic media company headquartered in Berlin and New York. Axel Springer is dedicated to shaping the future of journalism in the free world, believing that a free and informed society is essential to democracy. The company’s guiding principles - first articulated as The Essentials by founder Axel Springer in the aftermath of World War II - remain a cornerstone of the company’s foundation today. Learn more about Axel Springer.

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