AI Engineer, Agentic Ad Creative (Multimodal)

NewsBreak; Mountain View (CA); On-site; USD 100,000 - 150,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health, dental, and vision care

401(K) plan with company matching

Paid time off and holidays

FSA, HSA and commuter benefits

Team activity budget

Job summary

NewsBreak is looking for an engineer to own and drive the creative pipeline that generates thousands of ads daily across multiple platforms, such as Meta and TikTok. This role requires a strong background in diffusion and video models, as well as a solid understanding of costs associated with AI generation.

The successful candidate will work with a team that is innovative in the content intelligence landscape, focusing on building smarter and cheaper ad generation systems.

Benefits include comprehensive health coverage, a 401(K) plan with matching, and paid time off.

Qualifications

• Proven experience in diffusion and video models.
• Portfolio showcasing public artifacts and successful projects.
• Ability to manage cost as a design constraint.

Responsibilities

• Own and develop the creative pipeline for generating ads.
• Implement a CPI-feedback creative critic loop.
• Ensure compliance with advertising standards before deployment.

Skills

Understanding of diffusion models

Debugging video models

Building ComfyUI workflows

Creative ad instincts

Cost management skills

Familiarity with advertising standards

Job description

About NewsBreak

Founded in 2015, NewsBreak is the Content Intelligence platform shaping the future content economy. With over 40 million monthly active users, our flagship platform delivers highly personalized local news and information powered by advanced AI, recommendation systems, and adtech.

Recognized by Fast Company as #32 on the Top Workplaces for Innovators, we’re proud to be Great Place to Work® certified and home to a dynamic team of technologists, product innovators, and business leaders who are passionate about solving meaningful challenges at scale.

Together, we reached unicorn status in 2021, and we remain committed to continuing this high‑growth trajectory with the right team to fulfill our mission: building the infrastructure layer for content intelligence.

For more information, visit www.newsbreak.com/about.

About the Role

Every install we buy starts as a creative made by someone (or something). We’re rebuilding that creative pipeline so that an agent can generate thousands of images and videos a day across Meta, Google, TikTok, Pinterest, Reddit, and Snap; watch CPI and ROAS come back; and get sharper every cycle. We’re hiring the engineer who owns this agent end‑to‑end.

What You’ll Do (representative projects)

• CPI‑feedback creative critic loop — Extend our LLM critic + performance‑feedback regeneration from images‑only to images + video + copy, all closed‑loop, all running unsupervised at thousands of variants per day.
• Video pipeline — Build from a topic + product brief to a platform‑ready 9:16 vertical ad: script, scene plan, b‑roll, voiceover (ElevenLabs / Hedra), captions — in under 90 seconds per iteration, under $0.50 per iteration.
• Generative model router — Pick the right model per brief (Flux Schnell vs Pro, Veo 3, Sora, Runway Gen‑3/4, Kling, Hailuo), minimizing $/asset under a quality floor. Prove your routing strategy in production via A/B.
• Policy pre‑flight checker — Build a VLM (GPT‑4o vision / Gemini / Claude vision) that vets every frame and caption against current Meta / Google / TikTok ad policy before upload. Block 100 % of would‑be‑rejected creatives at the source.
• Brand‑style LoRA / DreamBooth checkpoint — Train and ship on past CPI‑winning ads. Deploy serverless on fal / Replicate. A/B against base Flux on real spend.
• Event‑triggered ad pipeline (video) — Earthquake hits at 14:02 → by 14:12 you have 50 paused video variants in Meta and TikTok, each with platform‑specific aspect ratios and locale‑specific voiceover.

You May Be a Good Fit If

• You understand diffusion and video models viscerally — you’ve debugged them, trained a LoRA, optimized inference, built a ComfyUI workflow you’d defend in public.
• You can name your daily model stack — Flux vs SDXL vs Veo vs Sora vs Runway vs Kling vs Hailuo — and explain when each wins, where each breaks, and what you’d reach for at $0.01/asset vs $0.50/asset.
• You have public artifacts — a fal demo, a Replicate model, a Civitai upload with >100 downloads, a viral X thread of your generations, a ComfyUI workflow on GitHub. Portfolio matters more than resume.
• You have scroll‑stopping instinct — you know what makes someone not swipe past an ad in the first 3 seconds.
• You think about cost as a first‑class design constraint — $/asset, $/click, $/install. Cost arbitrage between model tiers is something you’ve actually shipped.
• You’ve read Meta Advertising Standards / TikTok branded‑content rules end‑to‑end — policy is a pre‑deploy gate, not a post‑mortem.

Strong Candidates May Also Have

• Pretrained or significantly advanced a VLM (not just SFT’d or LoRA’d one).
• Open‑sourced a ComfyUI custom node, a diffusers extension, or a Replicate model with real traction.
• Deployed serverless inference on fal / Replicate / Modal at scale ( >10k req/day).
• Authored a public take on generative video model failure modes that other engineers cite.

Not the Right Fit If

• You’ve only ever prompted hosted models — you’ve never trained a LoRA, written a ComfyUI workflow, or deployed a custom checkpoint.
• Your creative experience stops at Photoshop or Canva templates. You can’t tell us why a Flux generation has bad hands or why Veo 3 over‑saturates skin.
• You think “AI creative” means asking GPT to write ad copy.
• You’re an academic researcher chasing first‑author papers. We ship.
• You’re a brand‑side creative director without engineering depth. We need someone who debugged a CUDA OOM at 2 am because the generator was holding up the next batch.

How We’ll Evaluate You

Take‑home: build a small agentic creative pipeline end‑to‑end — your call: image‑only or short video, hosted or self‑served, model of your choice. Walk us through what you built and every model / cost / quality decision behind it. Conversations with the team follow. Portfolio matters more than resume — if you can’t show a public artifact, please come back when you can.

What You Get

• Unlimited generative model budget — fal, Veo, Sora, Runway, ElevenLabs, OpenAI image, Anthropic vision, Hedra, Kling. We expect you to burn through it.

About the Team

You’d join the team building NewsBreak’s agentic growth platform. We already ship a CPI‑feedback creative critic loop, event‑driven creative pipelines, and multi‑platform ad‑upload tooling for Meta, Google, and TikTok. Your job: take the creative side from “thousands of images per day” to “video too, smarter every cycle, cheaper every month.”

Benefits

• Health, dental, and vision care for you and your family (100 % coverage for employee)
• Top‑tier 401(K) plan with company matching
• Paid time off and paid holidays
• FSA, HSA and commuter benefits programs
• Team activity budget

As set forth in NewsBreak’s Equal Employment Opportunity policy, we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.