Developer, Audience Engagement

Reports to: Director of Transformation

Work location: Detroit, MI (on-site)

Description

We are seeking a developer who puts the audience first. You will join the team that builds the websites and apps for our local news stations in Detroit, Houston, San Antonio, Orlando, Jacksonville and Roanoke. In 2027 our focus is engagement: helping people connect with their local news and with each other and giving them reasons to come back.

You will listen to our audiences through surveys, comments and community spaces, and turn what they tell us into experiences that fit them. You will connect survey answers to real, activated audiences: newsletters, alerts and pages our newsrooms use, and first-party audiences our advertising team offers to local businesses. Then you will help both teams plan how each launch reaches the people it is for.

This is a technical role for someone who wants their work used. You will ship, watch real people use what you built, hear what they think, and make it better. You take pride in using modern tools, including AI coding agents you set up and run yourself, to move fast and build with care.

Responsibilities

• Own an audience product of your own, live with at least one of our stations within your first 90 days.
• Turn survey answers into first-party audiences that refresh on their own, with consent recorded, and that our newsroom and advertising teams both put to work.
• Plan each launch with our editorial and advertising teams: who it serves, how stations use it and how sellers explain it.
• Grow the number of people who come back: return visitors, email and push subscribers, and contributors.
• Ship steadily. Take small features from ideas to live in two weeks or less. Set a success metric up front and report the results afterward
• Actively listen to our users and station partners, translating their real-world feedback into meaningful product changes.
• Share the AI agent workflows and guidelines that work well, so everyone on the team can use them.
• Adhere to privacy and security rules with every release; treat both as requirements from the start, not checks at the end.

Requirements

• Proven track record of shipping production-ready web or mobile app features that real people use.
• Fluency in TypeScript or JavaScript, React or a similar framework, and Node. Comfort across the stack: interface, APIs, data and deployment.
• Experience with audience data: SQL, event tracking and survey data, and turning raw responses into segments someone can use.
• Strong proficiency with modern AI development tools. You have set up and run your own coding agents, and you review and test everything they write.
• Git, code review, CI/CD, testing and feature flags as everyday habits.
• A habit of measuring what you ship. You define the metric before you build and read the results honestly, including the misses.
• Sound privacy judgment and working knowledge of web security: consent, common attacks and how to prevent them, and recently announced exploits and their fixes.
• An audience-first mindset. You start from the person using the product, seek out feedback after launch and welcome it.
• A clear bias toward shipping: you would rather release a good v1 and iterate than polish something indefinitely before users ever see it.
• Ownership. You see a project from idea to production and beyond, and you fix problems before anyone reports them.
• Clear communication with newsroom, sales and product partners, and a willingness to share what you learn.
• Experience with survey tools, audience platforms such as Google Ad Manager audiences or Braze, or mobile apps in Flutter or React Native is a plus.

Graham Media Group is an Equal Opportunity Employer. In addition to complying with the requirements of federal law, GMG will comply with applicable state and local laws prohibiting employment discrimination. Any offer of employment is conditional upon the successful completion of a pre-employment drug screening, investigative background check, employment/education verifications and reference checks.

Please submit your resume along with a link to a live web or app feature you have shipped to real users to [email protected]