Senior Software Engineer (Cloud)

About Us: Straight Arrow is fearlessly dedicated to exposing the hard truths in the stories that are dividing Americans today. We prize stories that connect to our audiences’ daily lives. Check us out at www.san.com and on the Straight Arrow mobile app.

Straight Arrow is on a mission to restore trust in the news by delivering fair, fact-based journalism in a media landscape that too often prioritizes outrage over accuracy. Our small but mighty technology team builds and maintains the platforms that makes this mission possible, from the SAN.com web experience to our mobile apps and the infrastructure that ties it all together. We move fast, build thoughtfully, and believe the right engineer can make an outsized difference.

About the Role

We're looking for a Senior Software Engineer who thrives at the intersection of Software, Platform, and Product. This is a high-trust, high-ownership role: you'll be the person our team leans on to make hard technical calls, clear blockers, and elevate everyone around you.

You'll have an impact on the full SAN.com ecosystem — our AWS infrastructure, web and mobile codebases, AI initiatives, and internal tooling. If you're energized by broad scope, enjoy R&D-style exploration as much as production engineering, and want to have a real impact on a growing media company, this role is for you.

What You’ll Do

Own our cloud footprint

You'll be the primary steward of Straight Arrow’s cloud infrastructure — architecting, provisioning, and maintaining our AWS & GCP cloud environments. This includes architecting, designing, and building full customer facing solutions in the cloud, leveraging CI/CD and IaC technologies, with consideration for security, scalability, reliability, and observability. 

Lead AI agent development and implementation

You'll own SAN's AI agents end-to-end: scoping, building, and integrating them meaningfully into our products and workflows. This is a genuine opportunity to shape how a newsroom leverages AI.

Build internal utilities and R&D

You'll accelerate all of SAN engineering by building internal platform products that save the team time, and help the organization move from "interesting idea" to "working thing" faster than we could without you.

Collaborate across Tech, Product, and Analytics leadership

You'll be a trusted technical voice in cross-functional conversations — helping translate business needs into engineering decisions and making sure leadership has what they need to make informed calls.

Be a force multiplier for the engineering team

You'll identify blockers before they compound, find shared solutions, and actively help the team work better together. Your impact will be measured as much by what you enable in others as by what you ship yourself. You'll invest in the growth of the engineers themselves through design discussions, code reviews, and just being someone they can learn from. 

Requirements

• Meaningful experience working within AWS, including serverless architectures (Lambda), infrastructure-as-code (Terraform/OpenTofu), and cloud cost/reliability management


• Experience working in mobile app or web development


• Comfortable working across a stack and across teams — this role requires breadth as much as depth


• Strong engineering fundamentals — you write clean, maintainable code and you know why it matters


• Demonstrated ability to lead technical projects from ambiguous problem to shipped solution


• Experience mentoring or leveling up other engineers

Nice To Haves

• Experience with Wordpress


• Experience with mobile application development in React Native / Expo.


• Experience with user / subscription management utilities (piano)


• Experience with vendor management, integrating with 3rd party utilities


• Exposure to vendor analysis


• Experience working in the media / journalism space

Why Straight Arrow:

• Real ownership, from day one


• A mission that matters: building technology in service of better journalism


• A small team where your work is visible and your voice carries


• The chance to shape both the technical culture and the product roadmap


• A chance to own new greenfield products end to end that positively impact both the internal teams and the customer

Straight Arrow is committed to providing equal employment opportunities for all applicants and employees, regardless of race, religion, gender, national origin, age, disability, marital status, or veteran status.