Backend Engineering Intern, Wirecutter

The mission of The New York Times is to seek the truth and help people understand the world. That means independent journalism is at the heart of all we do as a company. It’s why we have a world-renowned newsroom that sends journalists to report on the ground from nearly 160 countries. It’s why we focus deeply on how our readers will experience our journalism, from print to audio to a world-class digital and app destination. And it’s why our business strategy centers on making journalism so good that it’s worth paying for.

About

We work on the infrastructure and engineering systems behind Wirecutter’s products, improving software delivery and release quality while making the platform faster and more reliable through network and application architecture improvements. As a Developer Platform intern, you’ll contribute to practical projects that help Wirecutter teams test, deploy, and operate web applications. You’ll explore performance bottlenecks, strengthen automated quality checks, and see how your work improves the systems behind the product. We value curiosity and learning; you don’t need to know every tool on day one.

Responsibilities

- Help improve CI/CD workflows that automate quality checks and code deployment.

- Investigate web application performance and contribute to latency-reduction efforts.

- Explore network requests and application or platform architecture to identify opportunities for better performance and reliability.

- Build, test, and document improvements in collaboration with engineers across the team.

- Share what you learn, including tradeoffs, results, and ideas for follow-up work.

Basic Qualifications

- Experience working with CI/CD workflows, especially for automating quality checks and code deployment.

- Experience or project work focused on web application performance optimization or latency reduction.

- A foundation in software development and an interest in how applications, infrastructure, and networks work together.

- A thoughtful, curious approach to debugging and problem-solving, and a willingness to collaborate and learn.

- Experience working with AI tools and agents like Claude Code

Preferred Qualifications

- Exposure to AWS or Kubernetes.

- Experience with GitHub Actions.

- Familiarity with web application architecture, network requests, or performance measurement.

REQ-020880

The hourly rate of base pay for this role is: $40 — $40 USD
Candidate Use of GenAI Tools:

We’re excited to learn more about you and your experience. To keep our hiring process as fair and authentic as possible, we ask that you submit your own work and not use GenAI tools to generate substantive content during the application and interview process.

If you’re an engineering candidate, we’ll let you know what specific GenAI tools you are permitted to use for your technical assessment.

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