Solution Architect

Condé Nast is a global media company producing the highest quality content with a footprint of more than 1 billion consumers in 32 territories through print, digital, video and social platforms. The company’s portfolio includes many of the world’s most respected and influential media properties including Vogue, Vanity Fair, Glamour, GQ, The New Yorker, Condé Nast Traveler/Traveller, Allure, AD, Bon Appétit and Wired, among others. Job Description Location: New York, NY Condé Nast is a global media company producing the world's most iconic lifestyle, journalism, and fashion brands, aiming to inspire, inform and entertain our audiences across print, digital, video, and social platforms. 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 approaches. Engineering is responsible for scaling, building, and deploying the experiences that serve our audiences globally; the consumer‑facing surface is evolving to meet their 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 hands‑on principal role will set technical direction, make architectural decisions, and uphold standards that protect the reader experience. Responsibilities Front‑End Architecture & Stack Evolution Serve as the principal technical authority on front‑end architecture for our web application framework, making foundational calls on component design, state management, rendering strategy, and non‑negotiables for the rebuilt stack. Drive the implementation of an island architecture with guardrails that keep the platform coherent as it scales across brands. Establish and defend performance budgets and SLOs for critical reader experiences (load, render, scroll, media, page transitions) and ensure the platform meets them. Own measurement of real reader experience: define Real User Monitoring (RUM) and Core Web Vitals instrumentation, capture what matters, and transform it into a continuous feedback loop for front‑end and delivery health. Establish a governance framework for page content: surface the cost of third‑party calls and integrations, set clear baselines, and maintain control over what reaches the reader. Edge, CDN & Web Delivery Own the architecture of the edge and delivery layer: CDN strategy, caching, and cloud infrastructure that delivers our brands globally. Stay ahead of the delivery landscape: evolve CDN capabilities, edge compute, and bot/automated traffic strategies, translating trends into resilient, cost‑efficient 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 needed; the role is defined by the problems it solves, not by department boundaries. Treat AI as an integral component of architecture, prototyping, investigation, and shipping. Elevate AI‑assisted work across teams, sharing effective practices and candidly assessing limitations. Ideate, build, and launch agentic systems from concept to production, measuring impact and ensuring safety. Act as a senior technical voice that non‑technical stakeholders can rely on, translating reader‑experience goals into engineering constraints and realities into actionable language. Raise objections constructively when a proposal threatens performance, reliability, or reader experience, and propose sound alternatives. Requirements Substantial experience as a senior individual contributor or technical leader on consumer‑facing web at scale, with hands‑on ownership of front‑end architecture. Experience with CDN configuration on a public web system. Understanding of the adversarial side of web delivery (bot and automated traffic) and its impact on architecture and cost. Fluency in modern browser ecosystems (Chrome/Chromium, Safari/WebKit), especially mobile. Experience profiling and debugging real performance issues (frame drops, slow renders, memory pressure) and the tools to resolve them. Hands‑on experience with Real User Monitoring and Core Web Vitals. The ability to operate amid ambiguity: turning business goals into concrete, defensible technical plans. Strong written and verbal communication skills. Nice to Have Background in media, publishing, or other content‑delivery platforms operating at high traffic and editorial expectations. Familiarity with accessibility as an engineering discipline, not just compliance. 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. Collaboration across time zones and locations, with international colleagues across the US, Europe, and India. Teams own their apps, including on‑call duties. AI‑native by default and customer‑obsessed in intent, with data guiding decisions. 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. 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. #J-18808-Ljbffr