Staff Software Engineer, Personalization

Job Description:

The Personalization team builds recommendation, contextual suggestion, and related-content discovery experiences across Dow Jones digital surfaces. We combine reader activity, editorial priorities, trending content, and semantic similarity to deliver timely, relevant, and diverse journalism to our audience. We partner closely across Product, Data Analytics, Platform Engineering, and Editorial teams to create engaging, impactful experiences for millions of readers.

We are looking for a Staff Software Engineer to join our Personalization team in Barcelona. In this role, you will define the technical direction for core personalization services, overseeing everything from candidate retrieval and scoring to ranking and surface-specific business logic. You will translate complex user and business requirements into highly reliable systems and measurable improvements in content discovery. This is a senior individual contributor role combining hands-on technical execution, architectural leadership, and team mentorship, reporting into the Engineering Director.

• Design, build, and operate personalization services that deliver relevant content across Dow Jones products.
• Lead the evolution of personalization and recommendation workflows, from candidate generation and retrieval through filtering, scoring, reranking and cold-start.
• Scale algorithmic improvements and ML-based ranking, including model integration, feature development, evaluation, and tuning.
• Own technical design and production quality, including scalability, latency, observability, SLOs, incident response, and post-incident learning.
• Set engineering direction and standards through design documents, architecture decisions, code reviews, and mentorship.
• Enhance operational efficiency across CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code, and containerized deployments, leveraging AI-assisted developer tools where appropriate.

• 7+ years of experience in software engineering, focused on architecting and delivering high-performance, distributed backend systems (TypeScript and Node.js preferred).
• Demonstrated experience as a technical lead or senior individual contributor, owning architecture and guiding engineering teams (experience designing and scaling recommendation and content discovery systems is preferred).
• Proven experience designing and implementing production RESTful APIs and GraphQL services.
• Experience implementing, testing, deploying, troubleshooting and supporting multi-region, multi-environment systems with CI/CD, high availability and disaster recovery.
• Hands-on experience with infrastructure-as-code (e.g., Terraform) and automated deployment tools.
• Experience with Docker and Kubernetes for containerised deployments in production environments.
• Experience using LLMs in production, such as for content labeling or embeddings. GenAI experience is a plus, not a requirement.
• Degree in Computer Science or a related field or equivalent working experience.