Director, Engineering, Publishing Platform

Director Of Engineering, Publishing Platform

Cond Nast is a global media company producing the world's most iconic lifestyle, journalism, and fashion brands. We aim to inspire, inform and entertain our audiences through our portfolio of well known brands such as Vogue, Wired, Vanity Fair, Architectural Digest, GQ and many other leading brands.

We are on a journey with the major transformation of teams and systems: organizing for speed, ownership and customer focus with smaller, independent teams, and being AI native in how we work. Engineering is responsible for building, deploying and scaling the experiences that serve our audiences globally across brands, and the consumer-facing surface of that is evolving to meet our audience's needs.

About the Role

The Publishing Platform engineering team builds and operates the systems our editors and brand teams rely on every day: our content management system, rights management, editorial planning, and the content APIs that serve our brand experiences globally across more than 70 sites. It is a genuinely multi-tenant platform and its customers are internal: editors, producers, brand product teams, and the engineering teams that build on top of it.

This is a technical role focused on delivery, guiding the team on architecture, technologies and people management. You set technical direction in close partnership with our principal engineers and you are accountable for making sure the team builds to that direction and ships to it. You lead a globally distributed team from New York, working cross functionally with product, design and editorial partners who sit closest to our brands, and you own the health of those partnerships as much as the code.

Responsibilities

• Manage and grow a global group of engineering teams across CMS, rights, planning, and content API systems, led by engineering managers and tech leads reporting to you.
• Recruit, mentor, and develop engineers and managers; raise the technical and delivery bar across the group.
• Ensure operational excellence or systems that sit on the critical path of every brand, every day. Ownership of uptime, performance, and reliability.

Technical Direction

• Own the publishing platform roadmap in partnership with platform product management, balancing brand demand, editorial needs, structural investment, and technical debt.
• Partner with principal engineering on key architectural decisions ahead: content model and format strategy, API contracts, and the consolidation of our authoring toolchain.
• Treat the platform as a product: define and improve the contribution surface that lets brand teams ship on the platform quickly and safely, with governance built into the rails rather than enforced by review.

Cross-Functional Partnership

• Build strong, trusted working relationships with editorial, product, and brand engineering partners by translating their goals into platform plans and platform realities into terms they can act on.
• Set clear expectations and communicate on delivery with a focus on ensuring the team fulfills commitments.
• Partner across the wider organization (consumer experience, data, revenue, and enterprise technology) wherever the content pipeline touches their systems.

AI-Native Delivery

• Drive the evolution of authoring and editorial workflows for an AI-assisted world from AI-supported content creation to agentic workflows in production tooling.
• Make AI-native ways of working real inside your team as a default, not an experiment.
• Raise the standard of AI-assisted engineering across the team, sharing effective practice and assessing its limits candidly, so speed comes without sacrificing quality or trust.

Requirements

• Proven experience leading and growing engineering teams building and running platforms as products, with real accountability for delivery and quality.
• Experience owning content management, publishing, or comparable internal-platform systems.
• A track record of leading distributed teams across multiple locations and time zones.
• Sufficient hands-on depth to review designs and code, engage credibly with senior ICs, and contribute directly when it matters.
• Strong architectural judgment in content systems: content modeling, structured content vs. markup tradeoffs, API design (GraphQL/REST), and the seams between authoring, storage, and delivery.
• Demonstrated ability to build strong, trusted relationships with product, design and other cross-functional partners.
• Experience driving AI-native ways of working within a team, not just tolerating them.
• Sound judgment on the trade-off between platform health and delivery speed.
• Strong written and verbal communication, and the maturity to lead through influence as much as authority.

Nice to Have

• Experience in media, publishing, or another editorial-tooling-intensive domain.
• Familiarity with rights management, editorial planning, or media asset workflows.
• Experience leading platform consolidation or re-architecture while the platform remains in continuous production use.

Our Tech Stack

• Languages & Frameworks: JavaScript, TypeScript, Node.js, GraphQL, REST, MongoDB, AWS Lambda, Kafka, S3
• Delivery & Infra: AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform
• Source Control: Git, GitHub

How We Work

• Infrastructure as code everywhere.
• Quality Assurance is the team's responsibility.
• Pairing and other techniques to facilitate knowledge sharing and upskilling.
• Works with peers and stakeholders across time zones and locations, with international colleagues across the US, Europe, and India.
• Teams own their apps, including on-call.
• AI-native by default and customer-obsessed in intent, with a bias toward placing real work in front of readers and allowing data to guide the next decision.

The expected base salary range for this position is from $210,000-240,000. Salary offers are based on a wide range of factors including but not limited to relevant skills, training, experience, and education.