Senior Software Architect, Audience Lifecycle - NPR

OVERVIEW

A thriving, mission-driven multimedia organization, NPR produces award-winning news, information, and music programming in partnership with hundreds of independent public radio stations across the nation. The NPR audience values information, creativity, curiosity, and social responsibility – and our employees do too. We are innovators and leaders in diverse fields, from journalism and digital media to IT and development. Every day, our employees and member stations touch the lives of millions worldwide.

Across our organization, we’re building a workplace where collaboration is essential, diverse voices are heard, and inclusion is the key to our success. We are committed to doing the right thing in our journalism and in every role at NPR . This means that integrity, adherence to our ethical standards, and compliance with legal obligations are fundamental responsibilities for every employee at NPR.

Intro to Position

A Senior Software Architect exemplifies technical expertise and excellence at NPR. They work with leaders and cross-discipline team(s) to guide technology decisions, design scalable solutions, pipelines, services, or tools that support NPR and its Member Station Network. They are critical to shaping long term strategic technology decisions.

Architects lead and coordinate across our most technically challenging projects, those generally impacting multiple teams and/or product lines at a time. They partner with stakeholders and multiple team(s) to ensure successful outcomes. They lead strategy, solutioning, and collaboration of complex problems across a variety of areas such as workflow, architecture, quality, collaboration, tooling and more.

This role will be responsible for leading the data lifecycle and infrastructure that power audience facing products, including the collection, refinement & transformations, and activation of the data.

This is a union-represented role covered under the terms of a collective bargaining agreement with NABET-CWA DMU .

Responsibilities

• Architect Personalization & Data Systems: Lead the design, optimization, and scaling of real-time data ecosystems and event-driven pipelines that power personalized audience experiences across NPR digital platforms.
• Establish Self-Service Infrastructure: Design robust frameworks, governance standards, and APIs that enable engineering, analytics, and marketing teams to autonomously leverage data and personalization tools.
• Guide Technology Strategy & Standards: Evaluate emerging technologies, establish modern architecture standards (including medallion architecture and orchestration frameworks), and drive adoption across product lines.
• Technical Oversight & Governance: Provide technical direction and cross-divisional oversight for complex, high-impact engineering projects impacting multiple teams and systems.