Director, Engineering, Front End

About the role

Location: New York, NY

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 on a journey with the major transformation of teams and systems: organizing for speed, ownership and customer focus with smaller, independent teams, and being AI native in how we work. Engineering is responsible for building, deploying and scaling the experiences that serve our audiences globally across brands, and the consumer-facing surface of that is evolving to meet our audience's needs.

About the Role

We are looking for an engineering leader to own how our organization delivers the best-in-class customer experiences, the product roadmap, scale and stability across every brand. You will lead the engineers who build and evolve our web application framework and the consumer-facing surfaces built on it, and you will be accountable for the pace, reliability and quality of what that team ships.

This is a technical role focused on delivery, guiding the team on architecture, technologies and people management. You set technical direction in close partnership with our principal front-end architect and you are accountable for making sure the team builds to that direction and ships to it. You lead a globally distributed team from New York, working cross functionally with product, design and editorial partners who sit closest to our brands, and you own the health of those partnerships as much as the code.

Responsibilities

Team Leadership & Delivery

• Lead, grow and develop the Web applications team spanning multiple locations, holding responsibility for their delivery, quality and reliability.
• Own execution of the team's roadmap: turn business and product goals into a sequenced, credible plan and deliver against it, adjusting as outcomes dictate.
• Set clear quality benchmarks and hold the line on them while keeping momentum.
• Be a hands-on leader: close enough to the work to make sound calls, unblock the team quickly, understand the code to review and validate the technical decisions by the team, and stay credible with senior engineers.

Technical Direction

• Set technical direction for the team in partnership with the principal/senior principal engineers, and make the team accountable to the agreed architecture, standards and performance budgets.
• Balance the long-term architecture and scalability of the systems against short-term deliverables that contribute to business outcomes, and make the trade-off calls transparently.
• Guide the team through the ongoing evolution of the web application stack without losing delivery pace or reader-experience quality.

Cross-Functional Partnership

• Build strong, trusted working relationships with product, design and editorial partners, helping translate reader-experience goals into engineering plans and engineering realities into language partners can act on.
• Align and set clear realistic expectations and status on delivery.
• Partner across the wider organization (data, revenue, enterprise technology and design) wherever the reader experience depends on it.
• Lead a distributed, tenured team with maturity: earn credibility with deeply experienced individual contributors with domain experience.

AI-Native Delivery

• Make AI-native ways of working real inside your team as a default, not an experiment.
• Raise the standard of AI-assisted engineering across the team, sharing effective practice and assessing its limits candidly, so speed comes without sacrificing quality or trust.

Requirements

• Proven experience leading and growing engineering teams building consumer-facing web at scale, with real accountability for delivery and quality.
• A track record of leading distributed teams across multiple locations and time zones.
• Strong hands-on technical credibility in modern front-end / web platform engineering; be able to set direction with senior architects and earn the respect of senior ICs.
• Demonstrated ability to build strong, trusted relationships with product, design and other cross-functional partners.
• Experience driving AI-native ways of working within a team, not just tolerating them.
• Sound judgment on the trade-off between platform health and delivery speed.
• Strong written and verbal communication, and the maturity to lead through influence as much as authority.

Nice to Have

• Background in media, publishing or other content-delivery platforms operating at high traffic and high editorial expectation.
• Experience leading a team through a platform rebuild, re-platform or significant technical transformation.
• Experience leading teams through organizational change while holding delivery and morale.

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.
• Quality Assurance is the team's responsibility.
• 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.

Pay and benefits

The expected base salary range for this position is from $ 210,000-240,000 Salary offers are based on a wide range of factors including but not limited to relevant skills, training, experience, and education.

What happens next?

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.