Senior Software Engineer, Backend — AI Platform

NewsBreak runs production AI agents today — they diagnose live incidents, analyze metrics, and triage user feedback. We’re now upgrading our backend architecture to be AI-native: systems designed so that agents, tooling, and engineers can all operate them safely. This is a hands-on engineering role — you’ll modernize live, high-traffic services behind NewsBreak’s recommendation serving at scale, with a dual mandate: roughly half your time advances the architecture, half ships business impact.

Responsibilities

Lead the architecture upgrade of our backend services — untangle legacy boundaries, define clean interfaces, build in first-class observability — and land it incrementally on live, high-QPS systems; Build the infrastructure that lets AI agents act safely in production; Automate high-toil engineering workflows into reliable, self-serve systems; Deliver backend capabilities for product initiatives (experiments, growth systems, serving changes) when the business needs them; Own reliability for what you build: observability, safe rollback, and lessons that feed the team’s knowledge base.

Requirements

5+ years backend, strong Java, Kubernetes and CI/CD; You’ve led backend architecture design — service boundaries, data flows, high-QPS systems — ideally in large-scale recommendation, search, or ads systems, and lived with the consequences; You’ve refactored live production systems without breaking them: incremental migration, shadow verification, safe rollout are second nature; Rigorous about safety: you design for rollback and blast-radius control by default.

Nice to have

LLM-agent / AIOps exposure

Benefits

discretionary bonus; options