Software Engineer, Ads 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 the role

Own and scale the backend of NewsBreak's advertising platform end to end — from the advertiser-facing Ad Manager through the real-time bidding flow that monetizes our traffic — and act as a primary builder for our expansion into external demand and external supply.

This is a senior, high-ownership role on a small team. You will be one of a handful of people who can take an ads initiative from problem statement through production revenue, and you are expected to raise the technical bar and the operational resilience of the systems you touch, not just add throughput to them.

Responsibilities

Bidding flow (traffic side): own the serving path end to end — ad request handling, candidate retrieval, auction server, bid server, and the event/attribution pipeline — under high-QPS, low-latency constraints.

Auction optimization: improve yield across both our own auction and external auctions — floor pricing, timeout and latency budgets, network/exchange migrations — with results measured on realized CPM rather than on shipped features.

Ad Manager (advertiser side): design, build, and operate campaign and line-item modeling, targeting, budget and pacing control, spend accounting and billing integrity, and advertiser-facing APIs and workflows.

DSP build-out: implement and scale outbound bidding into external exchanges: OpenRTB integrations with SSPs/exchanges, creative delivery, audience matching, bid pricing and shading, budget/QPS protection, and post-bid reconciliation.

Defend the revenue path: build real-time metrics, alerting, and discrepancy detection for the money path, and diagnose revenue movements quickly when they happen.

Collaborate and de-risk: partner with product, algorithm/modeling, SRE, and ad ops; lead design reviews; document and share ownership so no critical ads subsystem depends on one person.

Ad quality where it meets serving: support creative and landing-page policy enforcement, fraud/cloaking detection, and invalid-traffic signals as they intersect the serving path.

Requirements

Required

5+ years of backend engineering experience building and operating distributed, high-QPS, low-latency production services (Java, Go, C++, or similar).

Strong system design fundamentals: service decomposition, data modeling, caching (e.g., Redis), streaming/messaging (e.g., Kafka), analytical query engines (e.g., ClickHouse, Trino, Spark), and cloud infrastructure (AWS).

Demonstrated end-to-end ownership of a revenue-critical or transaction-critical system, including correctness of money — accounting, idempotency, reconciliation — and production operational responsibility.

Comfort with ambiguity and full ownership on a small team: able to go from a business problem to a shipped, measured system without a spec handed down.

Strong written communication and cross-functional collaboration; effective working with AI-assisted development workflows.

Preferred

Direct advertising-domain experience — DSP, SSP, ad exchange, or ad server — including OpenRTB, real-time auctions, header bidding, budget pacing, bid shading, and attribution/conversion measurement.

Experience integrating with Google Ad Manager / Ad Exchange, Meta or Google ad SDKs, or major mobile exchanges.

Experience integrating ML model serving (CTR/CVR prediction, ranking) into an auction under latency constraints.

Experience with brand safety, ad fraud, or invalid-traffic detection.

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

$155,000—$260,000 USD

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