Senior Software Engineer, Backend — AI Platform

About the role

Founded in 2015, NewsBreak is the Content Intelligence platform shaping the future content economy. With over 40 million monthly active users, our flagship platform delivers highly personalized local news and information powered by advanced AI, recommendation systems, and adtech. Recognized by Fast Company as #32 on the Top Workplaces for Innovators, we're proud to be Great Place to Work® certified and home to a dynamic team of technologists, product innovators, and business leaders who are passionate about solving meaningful challenges at scale. Together, we reached unicorn status in 2021, and we remain committed to continuing this high-growth trajectory with the right team to fulfill our mission: building the infrastructure layer for content intelligence.

What you’ll do

• Lead the architecture upgrade of our backend services — untangle legacy boundaries, define clean interfaces, build in first-class observability — and land it incrementally on live, high-QPS systems.
• Build the infrastructure that lets AI agents act safely in production.
• Automate high-toil engineering workflows into reliable, self-serve systems.
• Deliver backend capabilities for product initiatives (experiments, growth systems, serving changes) when the business needs them.
• Owain reliability for what you build: observability, safe rollback, and lessons that feed the team’s knowledge base.

Requirements

• 5+ years backend; strong Java;
• Kubernetes and CI/CD;
• You’ve led backend architecture design — service boundaries, data flows, high-QPS systems — ideally in large-scale recommendation, search, or ads systems, and lived with the consequences;
• Rigorous about safety: you design for rollback and blast-radius control by default;
• Bonus: LLM-agent / AIOps exposure.

Pay

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

$118,000 - $212,000 USD