NewsBreak
Software Engineer, Ads Platform
About this role
NewsBreak seeks a senior backend engineer to own and scale the ads platform end-to-end, from the advertiser-facing Ad Manager through real-time bidding infrastructure. You'll drive technical excellence and revenue impact on a small, high-ownership team while expanding into external demand and supply channels.
What you'll do
- Own the bidding flow end-to-end including ad request handling, candidate retrieval, auction and bid servers under high-QPS, low-latency constraints
- Optimize auction yield across internal and external auctions through floor pricing, latency budgeting, and exchange migrations measured by realized CPM
- Design and operate campaign/line-item modeling, targeting, budget pacing, spend accounting, and advertiser-facing APIs
- Build and scale outbound DSP bidding into external exchanges via OpenRTB integrations, creative delivery, and bid pricing
- Implement real-time metrics, alerting, and discrepancy detection for revenue integrity and quick diagnosis of financial anomalies
- Collaborate cross-functionally and establish shared ownership to reduce single-person dependencies on critical systems
What they're looking for
- Backend engineering with Java, Go, C++, or similar languages
- Distributed systems design: service decomposition, data modeling, caching (Redis), streaming (Kafka)
- Analytical query engines: ClickHouse, Trino, or Spark
- AWS cloud infrastructure
- Revenue-critical system ownership including accounting, idempotency, and reconciliation
- Real-time bidding, OpenRTB, and ad exchange protocols
- High-QPS, low-latency service optimization
- Cross-functional communication and product thinking
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NewsBreak
NewsBreak operates a news and local marketplace platform serving 40M+ monthly active users, leveraging machine learning and data infrastructure to power recommendations, advertising, and matching between consumers and businesses. The company is hiring software engineers, ML engineers, and data specialists to build and optimize backend systems, ML infrastructure, recommendation engines, and algorithms that drive user engagement and monetization.
- Website
- newsbreak.com
Likely interview questions
- Describe a revenue-critical or transaction-critical system you've owned end-to-end—how did you ensure correctness of money, and what operational issues did you face?
- Walk us through your approach to optimizing an auction system for yield under strict latency constraints.