Newsroom AI and Automation Engineer

About the Role

Hearst Television (HTV) is seeking a Newsroom AI and Automation Engineer, an ideal candidate with a journalism/newsroom background passionate about Generative AI technology. You will develop newsroom tools and reader/viewer-facing experiences that responsibly and creatively harness generative AI and automation 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.

Benefits

Hearst's benefit programs are modern, flexible and designed to focus on you. As a Hearst employee, you and your spouse or partner or dependents would have access to the following benefits:

• Medical | Dental | Vision
• 401(k) matching
• Emotional Wellness Support
• Paid Time Off
• Paid Parental Leave
• LGBTQ+ Health Services
• Additional benefits to meet your and your family's needs

Key skills/competency

• Generative AI
• Python
• LLM APIs (OpenAI, Bedrock, Vertex)
• LangChain
• Cloud Platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure)
• Newsroom Automation
• Prompt Engineering
• Data Extraction
• Content Summarization
• Project Management