Senior Software Architect, Audience Lifecycle

OVERVIEW

A thriving, mission-driven multimedia organization, NPR produces award-winning news, information, and music programming in partnership with hundreds of independent public radio stations across the nation. The NPR audience values information, creativity, curiosity, and social responsibility – and our employees do too. We are innovators and leaders in diverse fields, from journalism and digital media to IT and development. Every day, our employees and member stations touch the lives of millions worldwide. 

Across our organization, we’re building a workplace where collaboration is essential, diverse voices are heard, and inclusion is the key to our success. We are committed to doing the right thing in our journalism and in every role at NPR. This means that integrity, adherence to our ethical standards, and compliance with legal obligations are fundamental responsibilities for every employee at NPR.

Intro to Position

A Senior Software Architect exemplifies technical expertise and excellence at NPR. They work with leaders and cross-discipline team(s) to guide technology decisions, design scalable solutions, pipelines, services, or tools that support NPR and its Member Station Network. They are critical to shaping long term strategic technology decisions.

Architects lead and coordinate across our most technically challenging projects, those generally impacting multiple teams and/or product lines at a time. They partner with stakeholders and multiple team(s) to ensure successful outcomes. They lead strategy, solutioning, and collaboration of complex problems across a variety of areas such as workflow, architecture, quality, collaboration, tooling and more. 

This role will be responsible for leading the data lifecycle and infrastructure that power audience facing products, including the collection, refinement & transformations, and activation of the data.

This is a union-represented role covered under the terms of a collective bargaining agreement with NABET-CWA DMU.

Responsibilities

• Architect Personalization & Data Systems: Lead the design, optimization, and scaling of real-time data ecosystems and event-driven pipelines that power personalized audience experiences across NPR digital platforms.
• Establish Self-Service Infrastructure: Design robust frameworks, governance standards, and APIs that enable engineering, analytics, and marketing teams to autonomously leverage data and personalization tools.
• Guide Technology Strategy & Standards: Evaluate emerging technologies, establish modern architecture standards (including medallion architecture and orchestration frameworks), and drive adoption across product lines.
• Technical Oversight & Governance: Provide technical direction and cross-divisional oversight for complex, high-impact engineering projects impacting multiple teams and systems.
• Collaborative Solutioning & Planning: Partner with product managers, engineering leaders, and stakeholders during OKR planning, roadmap development, and technical proposal reviews.
• Code & Architecture Quality: Mentor engineering peers through substantive design reviews, code standards definition, security/privacy alignment (GDPR/CPPA), and cost-optimization practices.
• Production Excellence & Operational Support: Participate in system deployments, establish CI/CD best practices, troubleshoot production incidents, and join the engineering on-call rotation after initial onboarding.
• Team Growth & Inclusion: Assist in onboarding new technical staff, participate in inclusive hiring practices, and proactively contribute to continuous process improvements within scrum environments.

The above duties and responsibilities are not an exhaustive list of required responsibilities, duties and skills. Other duties may be assigned, and this job description can be modified at any time.

Minimum Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience designing and leading solutioning and architecture planning in a multi-team environment.
• 5+ years of experience designing systems with scalability, reliability, and cost-efficiency as first-class concerns.
• 5+ years of experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, etc) and infrastructure as code (eg. Terraform).
• 5+ years of experience building applications that span multiple platforms such as web, mobile, voice, API’s, and system integrations using modern languages and frameworks.
• Demonstrated experience integrating with external API's / Services.
• Ability to design and lead practical technical design.
• Demonstrated expertise in designing real-time integrations and data-centric applications & services that power personalized user experiences at scale.
• Expertise in data governance strategy and implementation.
• Familiarity with medallion architecture.
• Fluent in Node/TypeScript, Python.
• Experience building consumers facing high traffic applications and related concerns - SEO, Browser performance, CDN configurations etc.
• Experience with Data Privacy and Compliance (GDPR, CPPA etc) concerns.
• Experience with test and development automation.
• Experience working with a version control system (Git preferred).
• Experience with cost-optimization & controls, forecasting, and evaluating trade offs for high availability systems.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with large-scale data processing frameworks (e.g., Apache Spark, Snowflake) or medallion architecture implementations.
• Familiarity with Machine Learning architectures, distributed search engines (Elasticsearch), or NoSQL databases (DynamoDB).
• History of contributing to open-source software projects or public technical communities.

Required Skills/Competencies

• System Architecture & Design: Deep understanding of distributed systems, event tracking, and API integration design.
• Technical Leadership & Collaboration: Ability to guide cross-functional teams and synthesize technical feedback into actionable designs.
• Data Strategy & Governance: Practical knowledge of end-to-end data lifecycles, refinement, and activation.
• Problem Solving & Resiliency: Strong operational mindset for diagnosing high-traffic production challenges and optimizing cloud costs.
• Inclusive Communication: Skill in explaining complex architecture concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Work Location & Requirements

• NPR Remote-Permitted: This is a remote-permitted role. This role is based out of our Washington, D.C. office, but the employee may choose to work on a remote basis from a location that NPR approves. You will have the option of working (a) remotely from a location of your choosing within the United States that is supported by NPR; (b) on-site at an NPR facility, based on the availability of desks and approval from NPR; or (c) a combination of both. Regardless of where you choose to work from, you may be expected to travel to other locations from time to time to perform the duties of your position.

Job Type

• This is a full-time, exempt position.

Compensation

Salary Range: The U.S. based anticipated salary range for this opportunity is $184,758.33 - $211,081.45 plus benefits. The range displayed reflects the minimum and maximum salaries NPR expects to provide for new hires for the position across all US locations.

NPR Benefits: NPR offers access to comprehensive benefits for employees and dependents. Regular, full-time employees scheduled to work 30 hours or more per week are eligible to enroll in NPR’s benefits options. Benefits include access to health and wellness, paid time off, and financial well-being. Plan options include medical, dental, vision, life/ accidental death and dismemberment, long-term disability, short-term disability, and voluntary retirement savings to all eligible NPR employees. 

Does this sound like you? If so, we want to hear from you.

#LI-REMOTE

NPR is an Equal Opportunity Employer. NPR is committed to being an inclusive workplace that welcomes diverse and unique perspectives, all working toward the same goal – to create a more informed public. Qualified applicants receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, ethnicity, national origin, ancestry, age, religion, religious belief, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth and related medical conditions, lactation, and reproductive health decisions), sexual orientation, gender, gender identity or expression, transgender status, gender non-conforming status, intersex status, sexual stereotypes, nationality, citizenship status, personal appearance, marital status, family status, family responsibilities, military status, veteran status, mental and physical disability, medical condition, genetic information, genetic characteristics of yourself or a family member, political views and affiliation, unemployment status, protective order status, status as a victim of domestic violence, sexual assault, or stalking, or any other basis prohibited under applicable law.

If you are a person with a disability needing assistance with the application process, please reach out to employeerelations@npr.org.

You may read NPR’s privacy policy to learn about how NPR may handle information you submit with any application.

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