Staff Software Engineer, Cloud Architecture & Engineering Velocity

Job Description

Arc XP is the platform and CMS for media companies. Purpose-built for publishers and broadcasters, it is the content platform and operating system that ambitious media organizations across digital media, news publishing, broadcast, and B2B publishing use to create and distribute content, grow and engage their audiences, and monetize through subscriptions and advertising. Fully leveraging AWS, the platform is built on a microservices architecture, and our teams deploy new features and products daily, operating as Software as a Service by Arc. Arc XP currently powers more than 1,500 sites in 24 countries that reach more than 1.5 billion unique visitors monthly.

This position sits within a group of senior engineers who collectively own application architecture across the platform. Within that group, this person is a primary architect for cloud architecture and automation and for how AI becomes a durable part of our runtime, our delivery layer, and our software delivery lifecycle.

Why This Role Matters

The cloud architecture that got us here is not the one that takes us forward. Over the next year, Arc's platform will increasingly host AI-native workloads, agentic capabilities, and intelligent experiences that reshape what we build, how we build it, and how our experiences are delivered and consumed. Inference becomes a first-class citizen alongside compute and storage. Our delivery layer moves to the edge, where content is personalized, assembled, and increasingly consumed by AI agents rather than only human readers. That brings a class of concerns most cloud architects have not had to address: seeing how AI traffic hits our delivery systems, defending against AI-driven scraping and attack patterns, and turning agentic consumption into something we can observe, protect, and monetize.

We are seeking a Staff Software Engineer for Cloud & AI to be a primary architect for where Arc's cloud is headed, not just where it sits today. What we are really after is someone who understands the AI landscape from a cloud engineering vantage point: not just how AI augments developers, but how AI consumes, attacks, and augments the systems that deliver our experiences.

The measure of success is accelerating time to market for product teams while expanding what "production-ready" means in an AI-native world. That acceleration comes from the right paved roads, signposts, and guardrails so engineers can ship with confidence, knowing the path handles scaling, security, cost, and the new shape of risk that AI introduces. We value targeted, idiomatic solutions over big platform builds, but "scrappy" never means cutting corners on safety or quality.

What Motivates You

• You think 12 to 24 months ahead about where cloud architecture is going (agentic systems, AI-native workloads, intelligent infrastructure) and you are already working through how it should land in production.

• You understand the AI landscape from a cloud engineering vantage point, not just a developer-tooling one.

• You prefer targeted, best-of-breed solutions over big platform builds. You would rather wire together the right tools than construct a monolithic framework that exists for its own sake.

• You are drawn to developer productivity and time-to-market, and you see security, reliability, and cost discipline as what makes speed sustainable rather than as friction.

• You are comfortable going deep in a domain while working as a peer among strong engineers, holding a high bar for the whole group and influencing without direct ownership.

How You'll Support The Mission

Cloud Architecture & Automation (primary focus)

• Reduce lead time for change across the platform by owning Arc's AWS architecture and automation as a primary architect, spanning CI/CD and delivery pipelines, infrastructure as code, compute, data and event-driven patterns, service and API design, identity (SAML, SSO, MFA, OAuth, Okta, extended to agents), and gateway and proxy components (NGINX, AWS API Gateway, AI and inference gateways).

• Give every team a fast, trusted path to production by establishing and evolving paved roads, reference architectures, and reusable components with signposts and guardrails built in.

• Keep the platform performant, resilient, and affordable by driving architecture decisions for scale and cost (with particular attention to AI and edge workloads) and by owning production monitoring across model-level signals (latency, drift, failure modes) and delivery-layer signals (agentic traffic, crawler behavior, abuse).

Developer Velocity & Platform Experience

• Shorten the path from commit to production by removing bottlenecks across the delivery lifecycle and by designing self-service build, deploy, and scale capabilities that teams trust.

• Let teams ship production-ready services in hours or days by designing developer platforms (CI/CD workflows, IaC frameworks such as AWS CDK and Terraform, service scaffolding, and observability patterns) with security and operational readiness built into the path, and by setting automation-first standards that cut manual toil.

• Make effectiveness measurable by tracking lead time for changes, deployment frequency, change failure rate, and time to restore service, and by guiding the platform investments that move them.

AI-Native Cloud Infrastructure

• Keep the company safe as product teams build intelligent features by setting the cloud infrastructure patterns and guardrails for running AI and agentic workloads (inference across managed providers such as Amazon Bedrock and self-hosted models where appropriate, retrieval and vector storage, and model routing, fallback, and caching for latency, cost, and reliability). The emphasis is on structuring and protecting the infrastructure, not building the products.

• Protect customer data as it flows through inference and agentic systems by architecting multi-tenant safety patterns: tenant-scoped retrieval, data isolation, prompt and response auditing, and abuse prevention.

• Give Arc consistent control over which models are used, how, by whom, and at what cost by designing the AI gateway, governance, and observability layer, partnering with security and data leadership on residency, retention, and privacy, and developing the FinOps model for inference-heavy workloads.

AI & the Experience Delivery Layer

• Let Arc and its customers see who and what is consuming content by designing how we monitor AI and agentic traffic across the delivery path, from the edge through the content APIs.

• Keep paid and proprietary content protected by architecting defenses against AI-driven attack patterns: aggressive crawlers, scraping, prompt injection, data exfiltration, and automated abuse that traditional bot management misses.

• Turn agentic consumption into a business advantage by structuring the delivery architecture so Arc can safely meter, tier, and where appropriate monetize AI access, and by partnering with our CDN and edge providers (Akamai, Cloudflare, CloudFront) to make edge intelligence, bot and AI defense, and personalization first-class capabilities.

AI-Augmented Engineering

• Help teams adopt AI tooling with confidence by defining Arc's approach to AI-assisted development across the SDLC (coding assistants, code-review augmentation, test and IaC generation, incident-response copilots).

• Hold AI-generated code to Arc's standards by establishing CI/CD guardrails and quality gates for security, correctness, and maintainability, and by building the evaluation harnesses that show where AI accelerates delivery and where it adds risk.

Strategy, Governance & External Operations

• Move the platform toward its future by guiding cross-organizational initiatives that make AI a core capability rather than a bolt-on, and by influencing leadership on tradeoffs and where to build, buy, or partner.

• Keep external execution aligned with Arc's standards by acting as the primary technical authority for our external operations partners, establishing architectural guardrails, contracts, and validation, while partnering with internal SRE and operations and keeping a clean separation of concerns.

• Raise the bar across the organization by mentoring senior engineers and architects, advocating for quality and testability (including evaluation strategies for AI behaviors), and embedding security best practices from prompt injection to data exfiltration and model misuse.

The Skills and Experience You Bring

Minimum Qualifications

• 8+ years designing and building highly scalable, distributed systems, including time as a technical leader or architect across multiple teams or domains.

• Deep AWS expertise (Lambda, ECS, Step Functions, CloudFormation, IAM, DynamoDB) and strong CI/CD and infrastructure-as-code experience (Terraform, AWS CDK).

• Proficiency in server-side languages, with a preference for Python and Node.js and experience in Go or Java.

• Deep knowledge of identity protocols (SAML, SSO, MFA, OAuth) and familiarity with Okta, plus web service proxy and gateway components (NGINX, AWS API Gateway).

• Strong grounding in API design, event-driven systems, microservices architecture, and database systems.

• Hands-on experience integrating AI and large language model capabilities into production systems, including patterns such as retrieval-augmented generation, tool use, and agentic workflows, with an understanding of the cost and latency characteristics of inference.

• Working knowledge of AI-assisted development tools (for example GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code) and how to govern their use within CI/CD and code review.

• A bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, or a related technical field is welcome. We weigh equivalent practical experience equally and do not require a degree.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience architecting AI-native platforms or AI gateway and governance layers in a multi-tenant SaaS environment.

• Experience with Amazon Bedrock, SageMaker, or comparable managed AI services, and with the cost, latency, and quality tradeoffs across model providers.

• Experience designing internal developer platforms and improving DORA or similar engineering-effectiveness metrics at scale.

• Experience working with external or outsourced operations teams in a governed architecture model.

• Experience in content platforms, publishing systems, or digital experience platforms.

• Familiarity with CDNs and edge platforms such as Akamai, Cloudflare (Workers and related edge primitives), or CloudFront, and with edge intelligence and personalization patterns.

• Experience with bot management, AI crawler and scraping defense, or agentic traffic monitoring and monetization at the edge (for example paid-crawl or metered-access models).

• Experience defining FinOps practices for inference-heavy workloads, and with model, inference, and delivery-layer observability.

Why Arc XP

At Arc XP, you will define the architecture that powers the platform and CMS media companies worldwide rely on, and you will do it at the moment when cloud architecture itself is being rewritten by AI. You will shape how our engineers build, ship, and scale applications, and how our customers' experiences become intelligent by default. This is a chance to set the direction, not inherit it.

Compensation and Benefits

Wherever you are in your life or career, The Washington Post offers comprehensive and inclusive benefits for every step of your journey:

• Competitive medical, dental and vision coverage

• Company-paid pension and 401(k) match

• Three weeks of vacation and up to three weeks of paid sick leave

• Nine paid holidays and two personal days

• 20 weeks paid parental leave for any new parent

• Robust mental health resources

• Backup care and caregiver concierge services

• Gender affirming services

• Pet insurance

• Free Post digital subscription

• Leadership and career development program

Benefits may vary based on the job, full-time or part-time schedule, location, and collectively bargained status

The salary range for this position is:

$131,500 - $219,100 Annual

The actual salary within this range will depend on individual skills, experience, and qualifications as they relate to specific job requirements. This position may be eligible for a bonus or incentive program, and a member of the Talent Acquisition team will discuss bonus payment terms and conditions during the interview process.

The Post strives to provide its readers with high-quality, trustworthy news and information while constantly innovating. That mission is best served by a diverse, multi-generational workforce with varied life experiences and perspectives. All cultures and backgrounds are welcomed.