Senior Software Engineer, Lifecycle & Messaging Platform

NewsBreak; Mountain View (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 280,000; Full time

Job summary

NewsBreak in Mountain View, CA is seeking a backend software engineer to design, build, and own a high-scale messaging platform that covers email, SMS, push, and in-app channels for user notifications.

You will collaborate with data and ML teams on event-driven systems, implement privacy and consent controls, and establish reliability standards as we scale communications.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of backend software engineering experience.
• Managed a messaging or lifecycle platform at scale.
• Experience with at least two channels (email, SMS, push).
• Proficient in Go, Java, Kotlin, Python, or TypeScript and SQL.

Responsibilities

• Design and build the messaging platform: triggering, routing, templating, retries, deduplication, rate limiting, scheduling, and delivery tracking.
• Build the consent and preference layer: per-channel consent records with provenance and suppression rules.
• Own deliverability end to end: sender registration and reputation, authentication standards, bounce and complaint handling.
• Partner with data and ML engineers on event-triggered engagement and frequency management.
• Provide experimentation hooks for testing timing, content, and channel without core platform changes.
• Establish engineering standards for compliance, audit trails, and access controls.

Skills

Backend engineering

Messaging systems

Event-driven design

On-call

Privacy compliance

Go/Java/Kotlin/Python/TS

SQL

Tools

Twilio

SendGrid

Braze

Iterable

Customer.io

In-house platform

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.

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

About Nearby AI

Nearby AI is a new company from NewsBreak building a trust-first marketplace for local home services. We help homeowners understand a problem, what it should reasonably cost, and whether to hire at all before they are connected to a provider, and we help service providers win work on fit and outcomes rather than on speed of contact. Our mission: give people clarity and control from the first sign of a problem to a job done right, and give good contractors work they are equipped to win. We are a small founding team. We work from evidence, keep a written record of decisions, and hold a short set of product principles we do not trade for revenue: no pay-for-rank, no sharing of customer contact information beyond what the customer approved, and no quality claims we cannot substantiate.

The problem you will own

In a two-sided marketplace, nearly every commitment made to a customer or a provider is delivered as a message: confirmations, time-sensitive notifications to professionals, outcome follow-ups that feed our quality measurement, shared summaries for family members, and longer-horizon engagement. Because consumer messaging in our category is regulated, the platform that sends these messages is also the system that enforces consent, preferences, and suppression. You will design, build, and own that platform across email, SMS, push, and in-app channels.

Responsibilities

• Design and build the messaging platform: triggering, routing, templating, retries, deduplication, rate limiting, scheduling, and delivery tracking, with reliability and observability as first-class requirements.
• Build the consent and preference layer: per-channel consent records with provenance, opt-out and do-not-contact propagation to partners within contracted timelines, quiet hours, and suppression rules that no campaign can override.
• Own deliverability end to end: sender registration and reputation, authentication standards, bounce and complaint handling.
• Partner with data and machine-learning engineers on event-triggered engagement, including frequency management and holdout design.
• Provide experimentation hooks so growth can test timing, content, and channel without changes to the core platform.
• Establish engineering standards for a system that carries regulatory obligations, including audit trails and access controls.

Qualifications

Required

• 5+ years of backend software engineering, including ownership of a messaging, notification, or lifecycle platform.
• Operated that platform at meaningful scale, millions of messages per month, across at least two of email, SMS, and push.
• Designed event-driven systems with explicit idempotency, retry, and deduplication guarantees, and carried on-call responsibility for them.
• Shipped within a consent or privacy regime such as TCPA, CAN-SPAM, GDPR, or CCPA, where the system, not a policy document, enforced the rules.
• Hands‑on production experience with a major messaging provider or platform (for example Twilio, SendGrid, Braze, Iterable, Customer.io, or an in‑house equivalent), and clear judgment about build versus buy.
• Strong proficiency in at least one of Go, Java, Kotlin, Python, or TypeScript, plus SQL.

Preferred

• Lifecycle or growth engineering on a large consumer product.
• Integrations with CRMs, call centers, or partner systems through webhook or real-time APIs.
• Deliverability troubleshooting at scale, including sender registration and domain reputation recovery.
• Experience building experimentation infrastructure.

Annual Base Pay Range

$150,000 - $280,000 USD

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