About this Senior Software Engineer, Backend — AI Platform role at NewsBreak
About NewsBreak
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.
If you’re inspired to dream big, innovate fast, and make a difference, we’d love to hear from you! For more information, visit www.newsbreak.com/about
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.
- Own reliability for what you build: observability, safe rollback, and lessons that feed the team’s knowledge base.
- 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.
- You’ve refactored live production systems without breaking them: incremental migration, shadow verification, safe rollout are second nature.
- Rigorous about safety: you design for rollback and blast-radius control by default.
- Bonus: LLM-agent / AIOps exposure.
