Senior Software Engineer, Lifecycle & Messaging Platform

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 Nearby AI

Nearby AI is a new company from NewsBreak building a trust-first marketplace for local home services. We help homeowners understand a problem, what it should reasonably cost, and whether to hire at all before they are connected to a provider, and we help service providers win work on fit and outcomes rather than on speed of contact.

Our mission: give people clarity and control from the first sign of a problem to a job done right, and give good contractors work they are equipped to win.

We are a small founding team. We work from evidence, keep a written record of decisions, and hold a short set of product principles we do not trade for revenue: no pay-for-rank, no sharing of customer contact information beyond what the customer approved, and no quality claims we cannot substantiate.

The problem you will own

In a two-sided marketplace, nearly every commitment made to a customer or a provider is delivered as a message: confirmations, time-sensitive notifications to professionals, outcome follow-ups that feed our quality measurement, shared summaries for family members, and longer-horizon engagement. Because consumer messaging in our category is regulated, the platform that sends these messages is also the system that enforces consent, preferences, and suppression. You will design, build, and own that platform across email, SMS, push, and in-app channels.

Responsibilities

• Design and build the messaging platform: triggering, routing, templating, retries, deduplication, rate limiting, scheduling, and delivery tracking, with reliability and observability as first-class requirements.
• Build the consent and preference layer: per-channel consent records with provenance, opt-out and do-not-contact propagation to partners within contracted timelines, quiet hours, and suppression rules that no campaign can override.
• Own deliverability end to end: sender registration and reputation, authentication standards, bounce and complaint handling.
• Partner with data and machine-learning engineers on event-triggered engagement, including frequency management and holdout design.
• Provide experimentation hooks so growth can test timing, content, and channel without changes to the core platform.
• Establish engineering standards for a system that carries regulatory obligations, including audit trails and access controls.

Qualifications

Required

• 5+ years of backend software engineering, including ownership of a messaging, notification, or lifecycle platform.
• Operated that platform at meaningful scale, millions of messages per month, across at least two of email, SMS, and push.
• Designed event-driven systems with explicit idempotency, retry, and deduplication guarantees, and carried on-call responsibility for them.
• Shipped within a consent or privacy regime such as TCPA, CAN-SPAM, GDPR, or CCPA, where the system, not a policy document, enforced the rules.
• Hands-on production experience with a major messaging provider or platform (for example Twilio, SendGrid, Braze, Iterable, Customer.io, or an in-house equivalent), and clear judgment about build versus buy.
• Strong proficiency in at least one of Go, Java, Kotlin, Python, or TypeScript, plus SQL.

Preferred

• Lifecycle or growth engineering on a large consumer product.
• Integrations with CRMs, call centers, or partner systems through webhook or real-time APIs.
• Deliverability troubleshooting at scale, including sender registration and domain reputation recovery.
• Experience building experimentation infrastructure.

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

$150,000—$280,000 USD

CPRA Privacy Notice for California Candidates