Software Engineer, Ads Platform

NewsBreak•Mountain View, CA

3h•$155,000 - $260,000

About The Position

NewsBreak is seeking a Software Engineer for its Ads Platform. This is a senior, high-ownership role on a small team responsible for scaling the backend of NewsBreak's advertising platform end-to-end. The role involves owning the serving path from ad request handling to the event/attribution pipeline, optimizing auction performance, designing and building the Ad Manager for advertisers, implementing outbound bidding into external exchanges, defending the revenue path with real-time metrics and alerting, collaborating with cross-functional teams, and supporting ad quality initiatives. The ideal candidate will have a strong background in backend engineering, system design, and end-to-end ownership of revenue-critical systems. Experience in the advertising domain is preferred.

Requirements

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.

Nice To Haves

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.

Responsibilities

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.
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.
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.
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.
Build real-time metrics, alerting, and discrepancy detection for the money path, and diagnose revenue movements quickly when they happen.
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.
Support creative and landing-page policy enforcement, fraud/cloaking detection, and invalid-traffic signals as they intersect the serving path.