Senior Data Infra Engineer, NewsBreak

$175-221k

SQL

AWS

Python

Scala

Kafka

Airflow

Hadoop

Redshift

Spark

Flink

Senior and Expert level

San Francisco Bay Area

5 days a week in office (Mountain View, CA)

Local breaking news app

Be an early applicant

Local breaking news app

201-500 employees

B2CArtificial IntelligencePublishingDigital MediaMedia

Be an early applicant

$175-221k

SQL

AWS

Python

Scala

Kafka

Airflow

Hadoop

Redshift

Spark

Flink

Senior and Expert level

San Francisco Bay Area

5 days a week in office (Mountain View, CA)

201-500 employees

B2CArtificial IntelligencePublishingDigital MediaMedia

Company mission

To connect and empower local users, local content creators, and local businesses at scale, with the goal of helping people everywhere live safer, more vibrant, more truly connected lives.

Job

Company

Role

Who you are

5+ years of data engineering experience, with at least 3 years owning production pipelines in a distributed data environment
Strong hands-on experience with Spark and Kafka at scale — you've debugged a production incident in both, not just run tutorials
Experience with big-data technologies including Hadoop, Presto/Trino, and Flink
Proficiency in Python and SQL; Scala a plus
Experience working in a cloud environment, preferably AWS (S3, EMR, Glue, Redshift)
Track record of improving efficiency, scalability, and stability of data systems — with measurable results
BS or MS in Computer Science or equivalent
Strong communication skills; comfortable driving data infrastructure decisions across application and platform teams

What the job involves

NewsBreak reaches tens of millions of users every day. Every feed ranking decision, every recommendation, every A/B test, and every ML model we ship runs on the data infrastructure you'd own
We're looking for a senior engineer to build and scale the batch and streaming pipelines at the core of that platform — someone who takes end-to-end ownership, drives reliability, and can translate ambiguous business needs into production-grade data systems
Own the streaming data backbone — design and operate high-throughput Kafka pipelines carrying user events (clicks, reads, impressions, shares) from mobile clients through to downstream consumers: the data warehouse and real-time analytics
Build and maintain batch pipelines at scale — author and optimize Spark jobs processing billions of rows daily: content ingestion, engagement aggregation, and user-level feature computation. Own pipeline reliability, incremental backfill strategies, and cost per TB processed
Drive pipeline observability — instrument data quality checks, freshness monitors, and anomaly alerts so issues are caught before they reach dashboards. Define SLOs for data freshness and completeness, and own them
Model structured and unstructured data — design data models that serve analytics and product use cases. Act as the data POC across teams and be the person who pushes back when a schema decision will hurt us six months later
Partner with data scientists and platform engineers — understand data needs across teams and drive key data infrastructure decisions. Unblock downstream teams without becoming a ticket queue
Improve efficiency — reduce compute costs and job latency through query optimization, smarter partitioning, better resource scheduling, and tiered storage strategies
Raise the platform bar — contribute to shared infrastructure: pipeline framework standards, orchestration patterns (Airflow), reusable Spark libraries, and data catalog hygiene. Mentor junior engineers on the team

Our take

News aggregation apps often focus on big global stories, but local news can easily get buried. NewsBreak exists to change this situation, using an AI-powered aggregator to connect readers with content creators who report on matters a little closer to home.

NewsBreak stands out with its focus on local news, which is beneficial for users who are looking for more relevant content than can be served by national and global publishers, and with smaller scale press companies which have been suffering financially for decades.

This focus seems to have paid off: NewsBreak has over 50 million users across the US, and its app has topped the US Apple App Store and Google Play repeatedly. What's more, it was voted one of the world's Best Workplaces for Innovators by Fast Company in 2025 and is rumoured to be gearing up for a 2026 or 27 IPo. If uptake and laurels continue, the company stands to grow substantially while helping reinvigorate a struggling and vital industry.

Steph

Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle

Insights

10% employee growth in 12 months

Glassdoor (4.4)

Company

Funding (last 2 of 3 rounds)

Jan 2021

$115m

SERIES C

Sep 2019

$14.8m

SERIES B

Total funding: $139.8m

Company benefits

Work from home opportunities
Health, dental, and vision care for you and your family
Top-tier 401(K) plan with company matching
Paid time off and paid holidays
Paid parental leave
FSA and commuter benefit programs
Team activity budget

Company HQ

Old Mountain View, Mountain View, CA

Leadership

Jeff Zheng

(Founder & CEO)

Having undertaken a PhD at the University at Buffalo, Jeff spent over 7 years at Yahoo!, prior to founding Yidianzixun, where he worked as CEO. He left this role in April 2015 to found NewsBreak, serving as CEO since.

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