Software Engineer, Web (New Initiatives)

We're seeking a founding engineer to lead the design and development of our next-generation web crawling and dynamic indexing infrastructure. Your mission will be to create an adaptive, real-time crawling system that not only integrates seamlessly with external search providers but rapidly evolves based on user queries and interactions, continuously expanding and refining NewsBreak's proprietary content index and recommendation knowledge graph. This is far beyond a traditional web crawling role. You'll architect and implement sophisticated crawling strategies informed directly by real user search patterns, enabling our AI agents to provide fresh, accurate, and hyper-localized responses. You will build infrastructure capable of dynamically responding to user queries, proactively crawling and indexing content within minutes, rather than days or weeks. Your work will directly empower our AI-driven question-answering and recommendation systems, creating a closed-loop feedback mechanism where user queries trigger real-time crawling and indexing tasks, continuously improving our content quality and comprehensiveness. This is an opportunity to rethink web crawling as a foundational intelligence layer, rather than a static data collection tool.

NewsBreak is redefining the way users interact with local news and their communities. By bridging local users, local content creators, and local businesses, our mission is to foster safer, more vibrant, and authentically connected lives. Through robust collaborations with thousands of local publishers and businesses across the nation, NewsBreak is revolutionizing how a new wave of readers access and engage with essential, locally sourced content & information. Since our inception in 2015, our trajectory has been nothing short of remarkable. We proudly stand as the nation's premier local news app. As a Series-C unicorn startup, our headquarter nestles in the tech hub of Mountain View, California, with other offices in New York City and Seattle.