Director of Content Engineering

Location: New York, NY (hybrid, 3 days a week in office)

Employment type: Full-time

Salary range: $130,000–$150,000, plus bonus

Reports to: VP, Network & Content Operations

About Curacity

Curacity is a two-sided marketplace connecting travel brands that need to be discovered with the publishers, travel writers, and content creators travelers actually trust. Hotels and cruise brands define the editorial coverage they need; our network of publishers and creators produces original content; Curacity coordinates the fulfillment and measures the outcomes.

We operate two products on that network. Newsletter places original editorial recommendations in front of publisher subscriber audiences and ties the resulting bookings back to the content that drove them. Vista AI builds the distributed editorial footprint that determines whether a property gets recommended when a traveler asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, or Gemini where to stay.

Curacity partners with publications including AFAR and Travel + Leisure, and was named among Inc. 5000's Top 20 Travel & Hospitality Companies and Digiday's Best Content Marketing Platform of 2024. We are headquartered in New York with an office in Stamford, CT.

About The Role

We're looking for a builder to design, build and run the AI system behind Curacity's content, and to lead our owned travel brands, Inside Hotels and A Hotel Life.

Our in-house studio already creates custom editorial content for more than 1,000 newsletter features a month, with AI supporting every stage from deciding what to write through drafting, editing and logging. What we need now is someone to turn that into one engineered system that scales as volume grows and channels expand: from long-form web articles to social media content down the line.

This is a human-in-the-loop system by design. AI should give our in-house editors real leverage, so they spend their time optimizing quality, not maintaining tools or racing to keep up with volume. Content is what our customers come for. It has to be good, and it has to be correct: there is no margin for factual error.

You'll treat this system as a product. Our content team is its first user; publishers are its eventual one. You'll get the inputs right (the hotel facts and marketing goals, publisher style guides and specs) and the outputs right (quality that holds as volume grows). You'll scale output in the near term while building, with our Product and Engineering teams, toward content publishers can generate for themselves.

Where This Role Sits

You'll work in the office alongside the content team, because the best requirements come from watching production every day. You'll plan with Product and Engineering on a shared roadmap: the studio prototypes and proves new systems and formats, and Product and Engineering harden and scale the ones that work.

What You'll Do

Build the content engine

• Map and instrument the current production line: time per piece, revision rounds, and where content errors and system bottlenecks occur.
• Audit the current system and tools, and choose the stack for the new build with Product and Engineering: tools that solve near-term needs and can grow into the long-term platform.
• Consolidate today's separate AI tools and agents into one documented, version-controlled pipeline that more than one person can maintain.
• Get the inputs right by turning hotel facts, publisher guidelines and image libraries into structured sources of truth the system reads at runtime, not instructions buried in prompts.
• Get the outputs right with evals that score every draft against publisher rules and hotel facts before a person reads it, and catch regressions when prompts or models change.
• Keep editors in the loop where judgment matters, so AI handles the volume and people make the final call on quality and accuracy.
• Extend the engine across channels, from newsletters to web articles and social content down the line.
• Stay on the frontier: test new models and tools as they ship, adopt what works and retire what doesn't.

Build toward publisher self-service

• Define the requirements and architecture for content on demand, together with Product.
• Prototype and test with real users, then hand proven designs to Engineering to scale.
• Design the guardrails self-service needs: brand standards, hotel review rights, error tracking and approvals.

Run the studio

• Lead the content team, train them on new systems as they roll out, and help them become operators who maintain and extend the system they use.
• Plan capacity against demand, and direct freelance support where it makes sense.
• Own the quality bar across every publisher in our network, and fix problems at the system level.
• Partner with Network Operations, Partnerships, Customer Success and Sales on the content we deliver.

Grow our owned brands

• Set audience growth strategy for Inside Hotels and A Hotel Life across email, web, social and AI search.
• Lead the A Hotel Life team remotely, including its editor-in-chief, senior editor, social media manager and contributors.
• Use the owned brands to test new formats and channels before they launch with partners.

What This Role Is Not

• Not an editor. You need a sharp eye for quality and voice, and the ability to turn "this doesn't work" into a rule or a test. You won't be line-editing copy.
• Not a prompt writer. You'll build agentic workflows, with evals and monitoring, that run reliably instead of prompts someone has to babysit.
• Not a product engineering job. You'll write code most days, but you'll build content systems, not ship features in Curacity's product.
• Not a product manager on a product team. You'll own a content system and its results, sit with the people who use it, and partner with Product on what it becomes.
  

The Impact You'll Have

• Growth. Curacity-written content powers most of our newsletter placements, and demand is set to roughly double. The system you build is what lets us meet it.
• Speed to revenue. New hotels and media partners start earning when their content is ready. Faster content means faster launches.
• Retention. Content quality is a big part of why hotels renew. You'll keep that quality high as volume grows.
• Leverage. You'll build a system that lets a focused team keep pace with growing demand.
• New products. Your prototypes become the foundation for publisher self-service and for Vista AI's editorial content.
• Owned brands. Growing Inside Hotels and A Hotel Life drives booking revenue and builds the AI search visibility our hotel partners pay for.

Required Qualifications

• A track record of building AI systems other people rely on: agentic workflows shipped to real users, such as content pipelines, tool-using agents, MCP servers or Claude skills, with structured inputs, evals and monitoring. We'll ask you to show us what you've built.
• 5+ years of professional experience. We care more about what you've shipped than where you started.
• Comfort in code. You can write, read and debug Python or TypeScript, work with APIs, webhooks and databases, and make changes without waiting on an engineer.
• Product instincts: you've scoped and shipped tools non-technical teams use every day, and you write requirements engineers can build from.
• A strong eye for content quality and brand voice, and the ability to turn that judgment into rules and tests.
• Experience leading people, including remote teams and freelance contributors.
• An understanding of how media brands grow audiences through email, search, AI search and social.
• Commercial judgment about how content drives bookings, renewals and revenue.
• Comfort building a new function while the product it serves takes shape.

What you might call yourself: content engineer, AI engineer, solutions or forward-deployed engineer, content operations lead, or an editor or writer who became a serious builder.

Preferred Qualifications

• Content generation at scale in media, publishing, e-commerce or marketing technology.
• Image generation and editing pipelines, or video and script workflows for creators.
• Travel, hospitality, luxury or lifestyle media.
• Superhuman Docs (formerly Coda), Airtable or Notion, plus Mailchimp and WordPress APIs.
• SEO, GEO or AI search visibility.

What We Offer

Curacity offers a competitive package which includes base salary, equity, and comprehensive benefits, including:

• Healthcare: Comprehensive medical and dental insurance plans, long-term disability policy, generous company contribution
• Retirement: 401(k) match – up to 4% of your total eligible compensation matched dollar-for-dollar (US-based employees)
• Flexibility: Hybrid Work for NYC-Based Roles: Virtual (2 Days); In-office (3 Days); Multiple "work from anywhere" periods/year
• PTO: Generous PTO policy, in addition to 10+ public holiday closure dates
• Wellness: $100 monthly stipend for health and wellness-related activities
• Recognition: Birthday, anniversary, and other everyday surprises and gifts to recognize our team members
• Culture: Casual, collaborative (and dog-friendly!) work environment in the heart of Flatiron

Equal Opportunity

Curacity is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to building a diverse and inclusive team and do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, national origin, disability, genetic information, marital status, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state, or local law.