The posting
About NewsBreak
Local life runs on local information. What happened down the street? Who can fix this? Where should we go tonight? NewsBreak started in 2015 to answer these questions, and today more than 40 million people a month rely on us to follow what’s going on in their zip code.
Three platforms with one vision: powering local life. Led by founder and CEO Jeff Zheng, NewsBreak is our local life and news platform; Nearby AI connects people with local businesses; and NDot AI helps publishers and creators grow and earn.
Building for the long term. A $115 million Series C made us a unicorn in 2021, and we keep investing in our people. We’re Great Place to Work® certified and named to Fast Company’s Best Workplaces for Innovators (2025) and Fortune’s Best Workplaces in the Bay Area™ (2026).
Everyone makes an impact. Whether you write code, shape products, tell our story, or run the business, we want people who own projects end to end, stay curious, and speak up. Join us.
Learn more at: NewsBreak, Nearby AI, NDot AI
About the Role
We're looking for a curious, technically strong software engineer to join our Corporate Ventures and AI Operations team. This is a hybrid role sitting at the intersection of backend engineering, ML infrastructure, and revenue systems — you'll build and maintain the pipelines and services that power our ads platform, engineer the recommendation systems that keep users coming back, build the tools that automate commission and quota-setting for our ad sales team, and work closely with business stakeholders to ship production systems that turn data into decisions. You care about the milliseconds between a user opening the app and finding something they love. You think about what makes someone stay, subscribe, and come back tomorrow — and you write the code that makes that happen at scale.
Responsibilities
Audience Retention & Performance Systems
- Help build instrumentation and monitoring systems that track performance signals (load times, stream quality, error rates) to ensure users experience fast, flawless products across web, app, and live streams
- Contribute to backend services and dashboards that track engagement and retention metrics — session length, scroll depth, return rate, and drop-off points
- Build tooling to help surface friction in the user journey, working with product and engineering to ship fixes
- Support the experimentation infrastructure used to test retention-boosting product changes
Recommendation & Personalization Systems
- Contribute to recommendation algorithms and services that surface the right content to the right user at the right moment, under the guidance of senior engineers
- Help build the data infrastructure (feature pipelines, training datasets, feedback loops) that keeps recommendation models fresh, accurate, and served in production with low latency
- Help instrument personalization systems to measure impact on session time, click-through rates, and long-term retention
- Partner with content and product teams to ship recommendation output into intuitive, performant user experiences
Data & Backend Engineering
- Build and maintain components of data pipelines and services that process large-scale ads, user event, and engagement data
- Write clean, well-tested code (SQL, Python, PySpark, or similar) to transform raw data into reliable, analysis-ready datasets and APIs, with code review support from senior team members
- Contribute to the data architecture supporting ad-tech integrations, paywall flows, and subscription checkout — helping ensure these monetization surfaces are instrumented, reliable, fast, and resilient
- Help build automated checks to monitor data quality and flag data integrity issues
- Partner with platform and engineering teams to keep systems scalable, observable, and well-documented
Revenue Operations Tooling
- Support the engineering behind the commission calculation system for the ad sales team, with a senior engineer owning overall design — focusing on accuracy, reliability, and auditability
- Help build tools that support sales quota-setting, working alongside senior engineers and Finance partners who own the underlying business logic
- Contribute to simulation tools that model commission payout scenarios and the cost/incentive impact of quota and comp plan changes
- Work with cross-functional partners (product, marketing, sales) to understand their tooling needs and help ship solutions
- Help build alerting to surface trends and anomalies in ads performance
- Help automate recurring operational reporting to free up team bandwidth
Requirements
- Bachelor's or Master's degree (recent grad or up to ~2 years of experience) in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field
- Solid software engineering fundamentals — data structures, algorithms, basic system design
- Proficiency in at least one general-purpose programming language (Python, Java, Scala, or Go) and working knowledge of SQL
- Coursework, academic projects, or internship experience involving data pipelines, backend services, or applied software systems
- Exposure to distributed data processing concepts (Spark, Hive, or similar) is a plus, not required
- Basic understanding of A/B testing and experimental design principles
Benefits
We offer a competitive benefits package:
- Health, dental, and vision care for you and your family (100% coverage for employee)
- Top-tier 401(K) plan with company matching
- Paid time off and paid holidays
- FSA, HSA and commuter benefits programs
- Team activity budget
The US base salary range for this full-time position is listed below. Pay may vary based on a number of factors including job-related skills, level, experience, geographic location and relevant education or training. At NewsBreak, we design our overall rewards package to attract top talents. Depending on the position, the role may also be eligible for discretionary bonus and options. Your recruiter can share more details during the hiring process.
Annual Base Pay Range
$135,000—$155,000 USD
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