Platform Engineer

About Us: Straight Arrow News is dedicated to delivering unbiased, comprehensive news coverage that cuts through the noise of national discourse. We prize stories that make the news feel real and relevant to our audiences’ daily lives. Check us out at www.san.com and on the SAN mobile app.

Straight Arrow News is seeking a Platform Engineer to join our growing team. We’re on a mission to raise the bar on journalism, and delivering world-class digital products is key in fulfilling that mission.

As a PE at Straight Arrow News, you will be part of a dynamic and innovative team that is constantly seeking to improve the news media industry and deliver news to viewers in innovative ways. This is a unique opportunity to play a central role in a growing technology organization - to design a platform that will power our newsroom and technical teams as they focus on our mission of true, unbiased journalism.

What You'll Do

Build the Foundation for Modern Journalism You'll help architect and maintain the infrastructure that powers our digital newsroom, creating reliable, scalable platforms that enable our editorial teams to focus on what they do best - delivering exceptional journalism. From our content management systems to our delivery infrastructure, you'll ensure our technology serves our mission.

Develop Editorial Tools That Matter Working closely with our editorial and production teams, you'll build full-stack solutions that eliminate friction from their daily workflows. Whether it's streamlining content publishing, automating repetitive tasks, or creating intuitive dashboards for content analytics, you'll directly impact how our newsroom operates.

Self-Service (Vending Machine) Solutions You'll design and implement internal platforms that empower cross functional team members to accomplish their goals independently. By creating self-service tooling, you'll decrease the time needed to publish stories and videos, ensuring our ability to provide timely and needed coverage of important stories.

Contribute to our Infrastructure Strategy You'll contribute to our Infrastructure as Code approach, managing our AWS environment through Terraform and CloudFormation. You'll ensure our digital properties are performant, secure, and highly available.

Drive DevOps Excellence You will collaborate with our engineering teams to architect and build our CI/CD and observability solutions. Your work will ensure that code moves from development to production safely, quickly, and reliably, enabling our teams to iterate rapidly on new features and improvements.

What We're Looking For

Technical Expertise

• Cloud Infrastructure: Experience with AWS services, along with Terraform, and CloudFormation for Infrastructure as Code
• Full-Stack Development: Proficiency in Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, with the ability to build complete solutions from frontend interfaces to backend services. Knowledgeable in the principles and quirks of mobile app development 
• Platform Thinking: Experience designing and building internal developer platforms, with a focus on self-service capabilities and developer experience
• DevOps & SRE Skills: Background or interest in CI/CD pipeline development, monitoring, alerting, and incident response
• along with content delivery systems

Nice-to-Haves

• Commerce Tools: Experience with user management, credit card processing, and PII
• Development Frameworks: Knowledge of modern JS frameworks, including React / React Native
• Content Management: Familiarity with CMS systems like WordPress 

Experience Level

• 3+ years of platform engineering, DevOps, or similar infrastructure-focused roles
• 2+ years of hands-on experience with AWS and Infrastructure as Code tools
• 1+ years building full-stack applications with modern web technologies (can be professional or a side project)
• Experience working with content management systems and digital publishing workflows is a plus

Mindset & Approach

• Product-Oriented: You think about internal tooling as products, with real users who have real needs
• Automation-First: You believe in eliminating toil through automation and self-service solutions
• Collaborative: You work effectively with stakeholders, translating business needs into technical solutions
• Quality-Focused: You understand that reliable infrastructure is the foundation of everything we do
• Learning-Oriented: You stay current with platform engineering best practices and emerging technologies

Why This Role is Unique

Direct Impact on Journalism: Your work will directly enable high-quality journalism by removing technical barriers and creating efficient workflows for our editorial teams.

Greenfield Opportunity: You'll have the chance to build platform engineering practices from the ground up, making architectural decisions that will shape our technology organization for years to come.

Cross-Functional Collaboration: You'll work closely with product, producers, editors, and engineers, gaining deep insight into how technology can serve the mission of unbiased and factual journalism.

Technical Environment

• Cloud: AWS (EC2, ECS, Lambdas, S3, CloudFront, CloudWatch, and more)
• Infrastructure: Terraform, CloudFormation
• Languages: Python, JavaScript/TypeScript (React / React Native), PHP
• DevOps: CI/CD, CDN, IaC, Lambdas, containerization, monitoring and observability tools
• Frontend: Modern JavaScript frameworks like React and Next.js

Ready to Join Our Mission?

If you're excited about using your platform engineering skills to support unbiased and factual journalism, building tools that make a real difference in how news is created and delivered, we'd love to hear from you. This is more than just a technical role - it's an opportunity to be part of raising the bar on journalism through exceptional technology.

Compensation & Benefits

• The salary range for this position is $110,000-$120,000.
• Straight Arrow News offers comprehensive health and wellness coverage that ensures our employees have the care and coverage they need to stay healthy, build current and future financial security and maintain work-life balance. All full-time employees and their dependents are eligible to enroll in our benefits. That includes generous paid time off, paid holidays and floating holidays; health coverage, vision and dental plans; retirement plans like the company's 401(k) plan with company match; and more.  

Straight Arrow News is committed to providing equal employment opportunities for all applicants and employees, regardless of race, religion, gender, national origin, age, disability, marital status, or veteran status.