Software Engineer, Ads Platform

NewsBreak•Mountain View, CA

11h

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 owning and scaling the backend of NewsBreak's advertising platform end-to-end. The role involves working on the advertiser-facing Ad Manager, the real-time bidding flow that monetizes traffic, and expanding into external demand and supply. The ideal candidate will raise the technical bar and operational resilience of the systems they touch.

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 skills.
Experience 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 for the bidding flow (traffic side) under high-QPS, low-latency constraints, including ad request handling, candidate retrieval, auction server, bid server, and the event/attribution pipeline.
Improve yield across both NewsBreak's own auction and external auctions through auction optimization techniques such as floor pricing, timeout and latency budgets, and network/exchange migrations, with results measured on realized CPM.
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 for the Ad Manager.
Implement and scale outbound bidding into external exchanges (DSP build-out), including 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 to defend the revenue path and quickly diagnose revenue movements.
Collaborate with product, algorithm/modeling, SRE, and ad ops teams; lead design reviews; and document and share ownership to ensure no critical ads subsystem depends on a single person.
Support creative and landing-page policy enforcement, fraud/cloaking detection, and invalid-traffic signals as they intersect the serving path for ad quality.