AI Engineer

Summary

Newsday is investigating ways to ethically adopt Generative AI technology to improve access to its data vault and allow readers and journalists to interrogate and analyze our abundance of datasets to learn about Long Island. We are hiring an AI Engineer to play a crucial role within our Digital Development team, managing this endeavor and being the lead developer on the project. Your expertise will be instrumental in shaping the future of AI in journalism.

This position reports to our Vice President of Digital Development. You will work closely with our development leadership team and Newsday's team of elite journalists, who are responsible for overseeing this project. This unique opportunity will allow you to collaborate with some of the best in the field, inspiring you to push the boundaries of AI in journalism.

This role involves travel to other newsrooms and conferences throughout the U.S. to give presentations and counsel.

• Use LLMs and prompt engineering to power a chatbot interface capable of querying Newsday's many datasets. The interface will analyze the user's questions and our data, provide an answer, and point them back to the source data. We are particularly interested in candidates with experience in these AI technologies.

• Develop an interface allowing reporters to upload raw data into tables for publication and analysis. The interface will also enable reporters to generate summaries, data highlights, trends, and outliers to assist journalists in finding "the story" in the data.

• Extend our data vault to have a multiuser/multi-publication interface, allowing other publications to leverage this platform, collaborate, share data, and benefit from your work.

• Build a containerized service to power the project that scales efficiently. Newsday works primarily with microservices running in Kubernetes.

• Work with your peers at other publications on similar projects. Newsday is part of a consortium and has partnered with other newsrooms on projects like this.

• Present results of your work in industry events and publications

Essential Job Knowledge & Skills

• An undergraduate degree in Computer Science, Statistics, Geospatial Analysis, Environmental Modeling, similar fields of study, or equivalent experience.

• 3+ years of technical consulting, systems engineering, or equivalent experience.

• Proficiency in MySQL, containerization, data analysis, python, Javascript, NodeJS, and user experience best practices

• Familiarity with the principles of machine learning fundamentals, such as natural language processing

• Experience building and delivering prototypes on top of a commercial AI platform or model, including considerations for data security, data privacy, and secure development

• Proactively identifies opportunities for maximizing business value through leveraging commercial AI models (OpenAI, Claude, LLaMa, etc.).

• Experience evaluating commercial software, particularly Software-as-a-Service platforms, for fit, flexibility, and cost.

• Curious and self-motivated; solves problems end-to-end and is willing to pick up whatever knowledge is missing.

• A humble attitude and an eagerness to help others with empathy.

• Manages multiple personal workstreams at once, including context switching and rigorous prioritization.

• Excellent communication and presentation skills, particularly when relaying technical information to a non-technical audience

• At Newsday, we have a tireless belief in the value of local journalism and a strong desire to support our Long Island community. If you share this passion and are eager to contribute to our mission, we encourage you to apply for this role.

Compensation 

• The annual salary range for this role is $135,000 - $140,000, commensurate with experience.

Newsday Media Group is an equal opportunity employer. Applicants and incumbents are selected, placed, trained, compensated and promoted without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, marital or veteran status, or disability or other classifications protected by applicable law. In addition, Newsday Media Group provides a reasonable accommodation for applicants/incumbents with disabilities. Please advise Human Resources if you require a reasonable accommodation.