AI Engineer, Agentic Ad Creative (Multimodal)

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

Every install we buy starts as a creative someone (or something) made. We're rebuilding that creative pipeline so that *something* is an agent — one that generates thousands of images and videos a day across Meta, Google, TikTok, Pinterest, Reddit, and Snap; watches CPI and ROAS come back; and gets sharper every cycle.

We're hiring the engineer who owns this agent end-to-end.

What You’ll Do (representative projects)

• CPI-feedback creative critic loop — Extend our LLM critic + performance-feedback regeneration from images-only to images + video + copy, all closed-loop, all running unsupervised at thousands of variants per day.
• Video pipeline — Build from a topic + product brief to a platform-ready 9:16 vertical ad — script, scene plan, b-roll, voiceover (ElevenLabs / Hedra), captions — in under 90 seconds per iteration, under $0.50 per iteration.
• Generative model router — Pick the right model per brief (Flux Schnell vs Pro, Veo 3, Sora, Runway Gen-3/4, Kling, Hailuo), minimizing $/asset under a quality floor. Prove your routing strategy in production via A/B.
• Policy pre-flight checker — Build a VLM (GPT-4o vision / Gemini / Claude vision) that vets every frame and caption against current Meta / Google / TikTok ad policy before upload. Block 100% of would-be-rejected creatives at the source.
• Brand-style LoRA / DreamBooth checkpoint — Train and ship on past CPI-winning ads. Deploy serverless on fal / Replicate. A/B against base Flux on real spend.
• Event-triggered ad pipeline (video) — Earthquake hits at 14:02 → by 14:12 you have 50 paused video variants in Meta and TikTok, each with platform-specific aspect ratios and locale-specific voiceover.

You May Be a Good Fit If

• You understand diffusion and video models viscerally — you’ve debugged them, trained a LoRA, optimized inference, built a ComfyUI workflow you’d defend in public.
• You can name your daily model stack — Flux vs SDXL vs Veo vs Sora vs Runway vs Kling vs Hailuo — and explain when each wins, where each breaks, and what you’d reach for at $0.01/asset vs $0.50/asset.
• You have public artifacts — a fal demo, a Replicate model, a Civitai upload with >100 downloads, a viral X thread of your generations, a ComfyUI workflow on GitHub. Portfolio matters more than resume.
• You have scroll-stopping instinct — you know what makes someone not swipe past an ad in the first 3 seconds.
• You think about cost as a first-class design constraint — $/asset, $/click, $/install. Cost arbitrage between model tiers is something you’ve actually shipped.
• You’ve read Meta Advertising Standards / TikTok branded-content rules end-to-end — policy is a pre-deploy gate, not a post-mortem.
• You’re a builder — Idea → working pipeline → first 100 ads shipped → CPI data back → tighter loop. Not “I’ll spec it for Q3.”

Strong Candidates May Also Have

• Pretrained or significantly advanced a VLM (not just SFT’d or LoRA’d one).
• Open-sourced a ComfyUI custom node, a diffusers extension, or a Replicate model with real traction.
• Deployed serverless inference on fal / Replicate / Modal at scale (>10k req/day).
• Shipped a video product end-to-end: script → scene plan → b-roll → voiceover → captions → final cut.
• Authored a public take on generative video model failure modes that other engineers cite.

Not the Right Fit If

• You’ve only ever prompted hosted models — you’ve never trained a LoRA, written a ComfyUI workflow, or deployed a custom checkpoint.
• Your creative experience stops at Photoshop or Canva templates. You can’t tell us why a Flux generation has bad hands or why Veo 3 over-saturates skin.
• You think “AI creative” means asking GPT to write ad copy.
• You’re an academic researcher chasing first-author papers. We ship.
• You’re a brand-side creative director without engineering depth. We need someone who debugged a CUDA OOM at 2am because the generator was holding up the next batch.

How We’ll Evaluate You

Take-home: build a small agentic creative pipeline end-to-end — your call: image-only or short video, hosted or self-served, model of your choice. Walk us through what you built and every model / cost / quality decision behind it. Conversations with the team follow. Portfolio matters more than resume — if you can’t show a public artifact, please come back when you can.

What You Get

• Competitive Bay Area comp + meaningful equity.
• Unlimited generative model budget — fal, Veo, Sora, Runway, ElevenLabs, OpenAI image, Anthropic vision, Hedra, Kling. We expect you to burn through it.

About the Team

You’d join the team building NewsBreak’s agentic growth platform. We already ship a CPI-feedback creative critic loop, event-driven creative pipelines, and multi-platform ad-upload tooling for Meta, Google, and TikTok. Your job: take the creative side from “thousands of images per day” to “video too, smarter every cycle, cheaper every month.”

If you read this and thought “finally, a JD that’s written for me” — we want to talk.

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

$120,000—$220,000 USD

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