Principal Engineer

Location:

Condé 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 undertaking the major transformation of teams and systems: organizing for speed, ownership and customer focus with smaller teams, fewer hand-offs, and AI native in how we work. Engineering is responsible for scaling, building and deploying the experiences that serve our audiences globally, and the consumer-facing surface of that is evolving to meet our audience’s evolving needs.

About the Role

We are seeking a principal-level technical authority to own how that stack is architected, how it reaches the reader, and what "good" looks like at every layer between our systems and the browser. This role will set technical direction, make the architectural decisions that other engineers build against, and uphold the standards that protect the reader experience. This is a hands-on principal role: you lead by both influence and taking on work directly in an AI-native approach

Responsibilities

Front-End Architecture & Stack Evolution

• Serve as the principal technical authority on front-end architecture for our web application framework, making the foundational calls on component design, state management, rendering strategy and what the rebuilt stack's non-negotiables must be.

• Drive the implementation of an island architecture which teams build against to the guardrails that keep the platform coherent as it scales across brands.

• Establish and defend performance budgets and SLOs for the experiences that matter most to readers (load, render, scroll, media, page transitions), and make sure the platform ships to them.

• Own how we measure real reader experience: define the Real User Monitoring (RUM) and Core Web Vitals instrumentation, make sure it captures what actually matters in the field, and turn it into a continuous feedback loop on front-end and delivery health.

• Establish a governance framework for what reaches the page: surface the cost of third-party calls and integrations, set clear baselines, and hold the line on what does and does not end up in front of the reader.

Edge, CDN & Web Delivery

• Own the architecture of the edge and delivery layer: CDN strategy, caching, and the cloud infrastructure that delivers our brands to a global audience.

• Stay ahead of the delivery landscape: evolving CDN capabilities, edge compute, and the fast-moving reality of bot and automated traffic, and translate those trends into how we architect for resilience, cost and performance.

Technical Leadership

• Raise the technical floor across the organization through design review, pairing, documentation and principled decision-making.

• Move into adjacent technical domains when the outcome requires it; the role is defined by the problems it resolves, not by fixed organizational boundaries.

• Treat AI as a default component of how you architect, prototype, investigate and ship, rather than as a peripheral experiment.

• Help raise the standard of AI-assisted work across the teams around you, sharing effective practice and assessing its limitations candidly.

• Ideate, build and launch agentic systems in production, moving from opportunity identification through design and implementation to operating them safely and measuring their impact.

• Act as a senior technical voice that non-technical stakeholders can rely on by translating reader-experience goals into engineering constraints and engineering realities into language partners can act on.

• Raise objections constructively when a proposal carries an unacceptable cost to performance, reliability or the reader experience, and propose a sound alternative.

Requirements

• Substantial experience as a senior individual contributor or technical leader on consumer-facing web at scale, with deep hands-on ownership of front-end architecture.

• Experience with CDN configuration on a consumer facing public web system.

• A working understanding of the adversarial side of web delivery (bot and automated traffic) and how it shapes architecture and cost.

• Fluency in how the modern browser ecosystem (Chrome/Chromium and Safari/Webkit) behaves across both mobile and desktop, with mobile as the priority. 

• Experience profiling and debugging real performance: frame drops, slow renders, memory pressure, and the tooling used to find them.

• Hands-on experience with Real User Monitoring and Core Web Vitals.

• The ability to operate amid ambiguity: to take an initial business goal and produce a concrete, defensible technical plan.

• Strong written and verbal communication. 

Nice to Have

• Background in media, publishing or other content-delivery platforms operating at high traffic and high editorial expectation.

• Familiarity with accessibility as a substantive engineering discipline rather than a compliance exercise.

Our Tech Stack

• Languages & Frameworks: JavaScript, TypeScript, React, Astro, Node.js, GraphQL, REST

• Delivery & Infra: CDN/Edge, AWS, Docker, Kubernetes

• Source Control: Git, GitHub

How We Work

• Infrastructure as code everywhere.

• 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 $190,000 - $215,000. Salary offers are based on a wide range of factors including but not limited to relevant skills, training, experience, and education.

If you are interested in this opportunity, please apply below, and we will review your application as soon as possible. You can update your resume or upload a cover letter at any time by accessing your candidate profile.

Condé Nast is an equal opportunity employer. We evaluate qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status, age, familial status and other legally protected characteristics.