Senior Backend Engineer, Ads Platform (OpenRTB)

Francisco Partners; Mountain View (CA); On-site; USD 155,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

NewsBreak is seeking a senior backend engineer to own and scale the advertising platform end-to-end, from the advertiser-facing Ad Manager through the real-time bidding flow that monetizes our traffic. You will be a primary builder for our expansion into external demand and supply.

This is a senior, high-ownership role on a small team. You will raise the technical bar and operational resilience of the systems you touch, beyond just adding throughput.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of backend engineering experience building and operating distributed, high-QPS, low-latency production services.
• Experience with designing and operating revenue-critical systems.
• Strong knowledge of caching, streaming/messaging, and analytics engines.
• Ability to own end-to-end from problem to production revenue.

Responsibilities

• Own the serving path end to end: ad request handling, candidate retrieval, auction server, bid server, and event/attribution pipeline.
• Improve yield across internal and external auctions, with focus on CPM.realized.
• Design, build, and operate campaign and line-item modelling, targeting, budgeting, and billing integrity.
• Scale outbound bidding into external exchanges via OpenRTB integrations and ensure latency budgets.
• Build real-time metrics, alerts, and revenue-discrepancy tooling.
• Collaborate with product, SRE, and ad ops to share ownership and reduce single points of failure.
• Support ad quality through policy enforcement and fraud/invalid-traffic detection.

Skills

Backend engineering

Distributed systems

Low-latency

Java/Go/C++

Tools

Redis

Kafka

ClickHouse

Trino

Spark

AWS

Job description

NewsBreak is seeking a senior backend engineer to own and scale the advertising platform end-to-end, from the advertiser-facing Ad Manager through the real-time bidding flow that monetizes our traffic. You will be a primary builder for our expansion into external demand and supply.

This is a senior, high-ownership role on a small team. You will raise the technical bar and operational resilience of the systems you touch, beyond just adding throughput.