NY Times appoints Sobel CTO

The following announcement was sent out from The New York Times:

The New York Times Company announced today that it is naming Jason Sobel as chief technology officer. Mr. Sobel, 40, will report directly to president and chief executive officer Meredith Kopit Levien. He will lead its Technology department when he joins The Times on August 23, 2021.

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

Jason Sobel said, “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. It is my honor to tackle that work with such a talented group of colleagues.”

Previously Mr. Sobel was at Airbnb serving as head of infrastructure from April 2019 until March 2021. From April 2016 to April 2019, he was Airbnb’s engineering director and global head of trust and safety operations, leading the team that developed the technology Airbnb uses to combat fraud that keeps hosts and guests safe.

An experienced technology leader, Mr. Sobel was vice president of engineering at Quantifind from September 2013 to November 2015. Prior to that, he spent six years at Facebook, where he worked on its backend platform to help steer the company through a massive growth phase.

Mr. Sobel earned an undergraduate and master’s degree in Computer Science from Brown University.