AI and Automation Engineer for Newsroom

This is a Full Time Job

The ideal candidate will have a journalism/newsroom background and be passionate about Generative AI technology. You'll help develop newsroom tools and reader/viewer-facing experiences that harness generative AI and automation responsibly and creatively to improve reporting, speed up workflows, and expand our coverage of local communities. This is a full-time, in-person role based in one of our HTV markets or at our corporate offices in Washington, DC or New York City.

What You'll Do
• Design, build, and maintain AI-powered tools that help newsrooms produce high-quality local journalism and grow audience.

• Develop products and features using modern LLM APIs and open-source models, including chat/assistive tools, structured-data extraction from unstructured sources, summarization, translation, and RAG (retrieval augmented generation).

• Integrate AI into existing newsroom workflows (CMS, planning, search, video, archives), minimizing repetitive tasks and speeding newsgathering.

• Engineer reliable prompts and system instructions; evaluate and fine tune outputs for accuracy, fairness, and clarity.

• Set up monitoring, logging, and analytics to evaluate tool quality, latency, and adoption; iterate quickly based on newsroom feedback.

• Partner with product, engineering, editorial, and standards/legal teams to design audience-facing features that are brand-safe and trustworthy.

Requirements
• 2–3 years of software development experience with strong proficiency in Python; working knowledge of Jupyter, NumPy, and pandas.

• Demonstrated experience implementing LLMs in newsroom-facing automation; familiarity with model capabilities and limitations.

• Experience with LLM APIs (e.g.OpenAI, Bedrock, Vertex, etc.) and modern AI frameworks (e.g., LangChain; experience with LangSmith is a plus).

• Experience designing prompts and evaluation strategies; comfort with guardrails, content policies, and bias/quality reviews.

• Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure), serverless architectures, and containerized development/deployment (Docker).

• Proficiency with Git/GitHub and modern development workflows.

• Working knowledge of HTML/CSS/JavaScript and integrating services via APIs; experience with web scraping.

• Familiarity, or willingness to meaningfully adopt, GenAI code-assisting tools (e.g. Cursor, Github Copilot).

• Strong problem solving and project management skills; ability to prioritize multiple projects and hit deadlines.

• Related military experience will be considered.

• This role collaborates closely with the Hearst Television AI Integration team and station newsrooms across our network.