AI Engineer — AI-Native Product Engineering

Mountain View, California, United States

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.

Location: Mountain View, CA

About the Team

We are rethinking how software is built in an AI-native world.

AI is becoming the default way we design, build, test, debug, and operate software. Engineers on this team work with coding agents to ship production products quickly, while setting the architecture, context, quality standards, and guardrails that make AI-generated software reliable.

This role is frontend-leaning, but not frontend-limited . We are moving away from traditional frontend/backend boundaries. You will start from strong client-side product engineering skills and use AI to work effectively across APIs, backend services, data flows, and developer tooling.

The expectation is simple: own the problem end to end, not just one layer of the stack.

What You’ll Do

• Build user-facing products end to end. Own features from product requirements and frontend architecture through API integration, backend changes, testing, rollout, and production metrics.
• Use AI as a core development tool. Work with coding agents to generate, refactor, test, debug, and understand code, while providing the context and validation needed for production quality.
• Own frontend architecture and product quality. Build maintainable component systems, state and data flows, performance-sensitive experiences, and reliable testing patterns for consumer-scale products.
• Cross frontend/backend boundaries. Make the API or backend changes needed to complete a product experience rather than handing work off at team boundaries.
• Set a high bar for AI-generated code. Review outputs critically and use automated tests, observability, staged rollout, and rollback mechanisms to verify correctness.
• Improve the AI-native engineering workflow. Turn repetitive development work into reusable agent workflows, tooling, conventions, and playbooks that make the team faster.
• Modernize existing systems. Refactor legacy frontend and service code incrementally so both engineers and AI agents can understand and modify it safely.
• Own production outcomes. Investigate performance issues, regressions, and incidents using logs, metrics, experiments, and AI-assisted debugging.

What We’re Looking For

• 3+ years of software engineering experience , with strong depth in frontend or client-side product engineering.
• Experience shipping meaningful user-facing features in production and making frontend architecture decisions around components, state, data flow, performance, or testing.
• Evidence that you can work beyond the frontend layer — for example, designing or modifying APIs, backend services, data contracts, or developer tooling.
• Hands-on use of modern AI coding tools or coding agents as part of real development work, not only occasional autocomplete.
• Strong engineering fundamentals and the ability to reason about system behavior, debugging, reliability, testing, and performance.
• Ability to learn unfamiliar technologies quickly and use AI effectively to expand into adjacent parts of the stack.
• Strong product mindset: you care about user experience and business outcomes, not just implementation.
• Comfortable operating in a fast-moving environment where engineers help define the solution rather than simply execute a detailed specification.

Bonus Points

• Experience building AI-native or agent-powered user experiences.
• Experience building or operating coding agents, LLM workflows, or developer productivity tools.
• Backend experience with Java, Kotlin, Python, Node.js, or similar technologies.
• Experience with recommendation, feed, search, ads, growth, or other large-scale consumer products.
• Experience improving web performance, experimentation infrastructure, design systems, or CI/CD quality gates.
• Experience shipping 0→1 products in a small, highly autonomous team.

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.

Voluntary Self-Identification

For government reporting purposes, we ask candidates to respond to the below self-identification survey.Completion of the form is entirely voluntary. Whatever your decision, it will not be considered in the hiringprocess or thereafter. Any information that you do provide will be recorded and maintained in aconfidential file.

As set forth in NewsBreak’s Equal Employment Opportunity policy,we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.

If you believe you belong to any of the categories of protected veterans listed below, please indicate by making the appropriate selection.As a government contractor subject to the Vietnam Era Veterans Readjustment Assistance Act (VEVRAA), we request this information in order to measurethe effectiveness of the outreach and positive recruitment efforts we undertake pursuant to VEVRAA. Classification of protected categoriesis as follows:

A "disabled veteran" is one of the following: a veteran of the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service who is entitled to compensation (or who but for the receipt of military retired pay would be entitled to compensation) under laws administered by the Secretary of Veterans Affairs; or a person who was discharged or released from active duty because of a service-connected disability.

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An "Armed forces service medal veteran" means a veteran who, while serving on active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service, participated in a United States military operation for which an Armed Forces service medal was awarded pursuant to Executive Order 12985.