Senior Software Engineer, Backend — AI Platform

Francisco Partners; Mountain View (CA); On-site; USD 118,000 - 212,000; Full time

Job summary

NewsBreak in Mountain View, CA is seeking a hands-on backend architect to lead an infrastructure upgrade for our high‑traffic services. You’ll untangle legacy boundaries, define clean interfaces, and ship an AI‑friendly, scalable backend behind our recommendation engine.

You’ll own reliability and observability, drive safe rollouts, and build self‑serve tooling that speeds delivery for product initiatives. 5+ years in backend, strong Java, Kubernetes, and CI/CD are required.

Qualifications

• 5+ years backend experience in large-scale systems.
• Expertise in Java, Kubernetes, and CI/CD pipelines.
• Experience designing scalable backend architectures.

Responsibilities

• Lead the architecture upgrade of backend services, define interfaces, and improve observability.
• Build infrastructure that enables AI agents to operate safely in production.
• Automate high-toil engineering workflows into reliable, self-serve systems.
• Deliver backend capabilities for product initiatives and experiments.
• Own reliability through observability, safe rollback, and knowledge sharing.

Skills

Backend architecture

Java

Kubernetes

CI/CD

High-QPS systems

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.

If you’re inspired to dream big, innovate fast, and make a difference, we’d love to hear from you! For more information, visit www.newsbreak.com/about

Location: Mountain View, CA

About the team

NewsBreak runs production AI agents today — they diagnose live incidents, analyze metrics, and triage user feedback. We’re now upgrading our backend architecture to be AI-native: systems designed so that agents, tooling, and engineers can all operate them safely. This is a hands‑on engineering role — you’ll modernize live, high‑traffic services behind NewsBreak’s recommendation serving at scale, with a dual mandate: roughly half your time advances the architecture, half ships business impact.

What you’ll do

• Lead the architecture upgrade of our backend services — untangle legacy boundaries, define clean interfaces, build in first‑class observability — and land it incrementally on live, high‑QPS systems.
• Build the infrastructure that lets AI agents act safely in production.
• Automate high‑toil engineering workflows into reliable, self‑serve systems.
• Deliver backend capabilities for product initiatives (experiments, growth systems, serving changes) when the business needs them.
• Own reliability for what you build: observability, safe rollback, and lessons that feed the team’s knowledge base.

What we’re looking for

• 5+ years backend; strong Java; Kubernetes and CI/CD.
• You’ve led backend architecture design — service boundaries, data flows, high‑QPS systems — ideally in large‑scale recommendation, search, or ads systems, and lived with the consequences.
• You’ve refactored live production systems without breaking them: incremental migration, shadow verification, safe rollout are second nature.
• Rigorous about safety: you design for rollback and blast‑radius control by default.
• Bonus: LLM-agent / AIOps exposure.

The US base salary range for this full‑time position is listed below. Pay may vary based on a number of factors including job‑related skills, level, experience, geographic location and relevant education or training. At NewsBreak, we design our overall rewards package to attract top talents. Depending on the position, the role may also be eligible for discretionary bonus and options. Your recruiter can share more details during the hiring process.

$118,000 — $212,000 USD

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