Senior Software Architect, Audience Lifecycle

About this role

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…