Software Engineer
US$155,000 – US$260,000 / yr base salary
Posted 9 Sep 2026
Advertised as “Software Engineer, Ads Platform”
BranchFactor Summary
The original posting with the fluff stripped out
- Expected experience
- 5+ yrs
- Management level
- Individual contributor
| Base salary | US$155,000 – US$260,000 / yr |
|---|
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 the role
Own and scale the backend of NewsBreak's advertising platform end to end — from the advertiser-facing Ad Manager through the real-time bidding flow that monetizes our traffic — and act as a primary builder for our expansion into external demand and external supply.
This is a senior, high-ownership role on a small team. You will be one of a handful of people who can take an ads initiative from problem statement through production revenue, and you are expected to raise the technical bar and the operational resilience of the systems you touch, not just add throughput to them.
Responsibilities
Bidding flow (traffic side): own the serving path end to end — ad request handling, candidate retrieval, auction server, bid server, and the event/attribution pipeline — under high-QPS, low-latency constraints.
Auction optimization: improve yield across both our own auction and external auctions — floor pricing, timeout and latency budgets, network/exchange migrations — with results measured on realized CPM rather than on shipped features.
Ad Manager (advertiser side): 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.
DSP build-out: implement and scale outbound bidding into external exchanges: OpenRTB integrations with SSPs/exchanges, creative delivery, audience matching, bid pricing and shading, budget/QPS protection, and post-bid reconciliation.
Defend the revenue path: build real-time metrics, alerting, and discrepancy detection for the money path, and diagnose revenue movements quickly when they happen.