The New York Times Taps Jason Sobel as CTO

The engineer previously had stints at Airbnb and Facebook

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The New York Times has named Jason Sobel as its chief technology officer, the company announced Wednesday.

Sobel will report directly to President and CEO Meredith Kopit Levien. He will lead the company’s technology department and begin his role on Aug. 23.

“Jason is a talented engineering leader with nearly 20 years of experience tackling high-scale technical challenges at Airbnb and Facebook,” Levien said in a statement.

“That background, plus a deep interest in The Times’s mission and a track record of attracting and developing top talent make him the ideal executive to lead The Times’s fast-growing engineering team,” Levien’s statement continued. “Technology is central to our journalism and business ambitions and one of the most important drivers of our subscription growth. In Jason, we’ve found the ideal leader and executive partner to take us on the next leg of our technological journey.”

Sobel worked at Airbnb as head of infrastructure from 2019 to 2021, and before that, served as its engineering director and global head of trust and safety operations. At Airbnb, he led the team that built technology to combat fraud.

“The New York Times is the leading innovator in the business of journalism. The combination of high quality reporting and editing with amazing technology that enables people to find and experience their journalism at scale is at the core of their success. The future of journalism will demand both a strong technology platform and best-in-class consumer applications,” Sobel said in a statement.

Prior to his role at Airbnb, Sobel was vice president of engineering at Quantifind from 2013 to 2015. He also spent six years at Facebook before that, working on the backend and growth of the platform.

Sobel got his undergraduate and master’s degrees in computer science from Brown University.

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