Lead Engineer, Schibsted Product Lab

Schibsted's product ambition is to reinvent our media destinations for the AI era, to make our journalism a relevant daily habit for more people. Most of that work happens in our existing product organisation, where we continuously improve and reinvent products used by millions of people every day. But some ideas need something different. They need more freedom from today's products and business models, a longer horizon, greater uncertainty and permission to challenge the core.

That's why we're setting up Schibsted Product Lab.

It's a small, autonomous unit that builds, launches and tests new media products with real users. We start small and invest more as the evidence grows. We stop ideas that don't prove themselves. And we help the ones that work become part of Schibsted's core, or reshape it.

We're now looking for a Lead Engineer to join the Product Lab core team.

How we want to work

Our ambition is to make Product Lab an AI-enabled, high-velocity product environment where we can move from idea to execution at high speed. We want to push the boundaries of how emerging technologies can transform the way we discover, design and build products, equipping small teams with the tools and capabilities to turn ambitious ideas into real user experiences in days rather than months. We embrace experimentation, challenge established ways of working and prioritise learning over perfection. And we see the ability to confidently stop an idea that doesn't work as just as important as knowing when to invest further.

Your mission is to find out what's technically possible, and to build enough to prove it. You'll be as much an AI engineer as a software engineer, because much of what the Lab builds has AI at its core.

"Lead" means you're the senior engineer in the Lab's core team, so the technical calls are yours. You set the technical direction across our ideas, and you write a lot of the code yourself. That also means you drive your own work and your own learning. You're part of the core team led by the Director of Product Lab, and you report directly to the Director of Technology in Schibsted's Product organisation.

The role grows with the Lab. You start with no direct reports and your hands in the code. As Product Lab grows, you'll also help shape how we build technical teams around successful bets, and strengthen the engineering craft and culture of the Lab. Over time, that can include people management.

What you will do

• Assess new product ideas quickly for technical feasibility, cost and risk, and give a clear recommendation to stop, continue or scale them.

• Build and ship early prototypes and experiments, using whatever mix of code, AI tools, APIs and Schibsted platforms gets us to real user learning fastest.

• Build new product experiences with AI at the core, using language models, agents and retrieval over our journalism, rather than adding AI to the products we already have.

• Make architecture and technology choices that fit how mature each idea is, and know what a scrappy prototype needs to become a solid, scalable product.

• Work closely with product, design and editorial colleagues, and connect Lab ideas with the engineering, data, AI and platform teams across Schibsted.

• Coach the engineers who join our teams, many of them for a few weeks or months from other parts of Schibsted, so they take new skills back to their own teams.

You're a product-minded engineer and builder who thrives at the earliest and most uncertain stage of a product. You enjoy finding out whether something can be built, finding the fastest credible way to test it, and moving on once the important questions have answers.

You're pragmatic rather than precious about technology. Sometimes the right answer is solid engineering. Sometimes it's an API, an AI-generated prototype, or something held together just well enough to test an idea. You know the difference, and you know when it's time to rebuild. So this isn't a role for someone who wants to build everything from scratch, or to optimise for production quality from day one.

We believe you bring

• Significant experience building digital and AI products as a software engineer, tech lead or similar senior role, and you're still strongly hands-on.

• Hands-on experience building on AI models. You've shipped products or features built on language models, such as agents, retrieval or generated content. You know how to measure whether the output is good enough, and what it costs to run.

• Broad technical skills across front end, back end, APIs and data, so you can build a whole prototype yourself.

• An AI-native way of working. Coding agents such as Claude Code, Cursor or Codex are part of how you build every day. You can show us how you use them, where they help and where they don't.

• Experience taking products from prototype to production, with the judgement to make pragmatic trade-offs when information is limited.

• A track record of stopping things. You've recommended stopping a feature, a system or a product you believed in when the evidence went against it. And you can tell us how you did it.

• Technical leadership and coaching. You bring people together around a problem and give engineers direction without formal authority. You've coached other engineers and helped them grow. You'd like to grow into broader leadership as the Lab grows.

• Ownership of your own work and growth. You keep your skills current without anyone senior to guide you, and you find your own sparring partners, inside Schibsted and outside.

• You help build something new from the start. You join the Lab's first core team and shape how it works and what its culture becomes.

• You build on things a start-up has to earn first. Trusted brands, our journalism, our data and millions of users.

• Your work reaches real users. We launch to learn, and products that work have a path into VG, Aftonbladet and our other brands.

• You get room to work and clear decisions. The Lab works outside today's roadmaps and KPIs, and every idea gets a clear decision at set points.

• You work on what's changing in media. AI is changing how people find and use journalism, and young people are forming their habits outside traditional news sites. You help decide what Schibsted's answer looks like.

Schibsted is the largest news provider in the Nordics, with brands such as VG, Aftonbladet, TV4, MTV, Aftenposten, Svenska Dagbladet, and Podme. Every day we inform, engage, and entertain millions of people across Sweden, Norway, and Finland.

Since 1839, trust has been our foundation. Our journalism empowers people, builds communities, and strengthens democracy – and innovation ensures we continue to protect that mission.

Our democracies depend on independent journalism. That’s our business.