Full-Time
Staff Machine Learning Engineer
Recommendation & AI Platform
NewsBreak
201-500 employees
Digital news aggregation and distribution platform
Compensation Overview
$230k - $300k/yr
Mountain View, CA, USA
In Person
 AI & Machine Learning (1) |
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- At least 8 years of industry experience building large-scale machine learning or recommendation systems.
- Deep expertise in recommendation systems and applied machine learning in production environments.
- Strong system design skills and the ability to influence architecture across teams.
- A proven track record of technical leadership and cross-team collaboration.
- Define technical direction for large-scale personalization systems and lead complex projects across teams.
- Drive adoption of artificial intelligence and large language model technologies in product capabilities and engineering workflows.
- Lead the design of next-generation recommendation system architectures at scale.
- Drive best practices for model lifecycle management, experimentation, and system reliability.
- Partner with product, infrastructure, and data teams to align technical strategy with business goals.
- Own complex initiatives across retrieval, ranking, re-ranking, and multi-objective optimization.
- Lead the application of large language models and foundation models in recommendation, content intelligence, and user modeling.
- Evaluate emerging artificial intelligence technologies and guide their adoption into production systems.
- Champion artificial-intelligence-native development practices, including large-language-model-assisted coding, experimentation, and analysis.
- Help establish standards and shared tooling for AI-driven engineering.
- Lead zero-to-one artificial intelligence initiatives from ideation and technical validation through production rollout and scaling.
- Ensure successful prototypes evolve into maintainable, scalable platforms.
- Demonstrated success applying large language models or foundation models to recommendation or content systems in production.
- Experience leading zero-to-one artificial intelligence platform or product initiatives.
- Experience improving engineering velocity through artificial-intelligence-assisted development workflows.
NewsBreak operates a digital platform that aggregates and distributes news from various sources, including independent contributors and traditional media outlets. The platform works by gathering articles across diverse topics like local events, global news, and lifestyle, then presenting them in an easy-to-read format through a mobile app and website. Unlike many competitors that focus solely on national headlines, NewsBreak emphasizes hyper-local content and a wide variety of niche topics to serve a broader audience. Its goal is to provide a comprehensive and accessible news feed for general readers while generating revenue through advertising and content partnerships.
Company Size
201-500
Company Stage
Series C
Total Funding
$139.8M
Headquarters
Mountain View, California
Founded
2015
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Simplify's Take
What believers are saying
- NewsBreak launched SPOTLIGHTS on May 6, 2026, reaching 40 million monthly readers.
- Early SPOTLIGHTS results showed 76 million impressions, 1.52 million views, and 19,000 shares.
- The ad platform and 2026 publisher integrations widen monetization beyond generic CPM and CPC buying.
What critics are saying
- Emmerich Newspapers v. Particle Media reached the Fifth Circuit on June 2, 2026.
- Comeback Media kept a vicarious copyright claim alive against NewsBreak on February 26, 2026.
- If courts reject the server test, NewsBreak’s embedded-content model faces existential copyright liability.
What makes NewsBreak unique
- NewsBreak pairs hyperlocal news aggregation with 40 million monthly U.S. readers on one app.
- Its Publisher Partner program republishes full RSS articles, giving local outlets immediate distribution and monetization.
- SPOTLIGHTS turns small businesses into local stories, blending advertising and editorial distribution inside NewsBreak.
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Benefits
Health Insurance
Dental Insurance
Vision Insurance
401(k) Retirement Plan
401(k) Company Match
Paid Vacation
Paid Sick Leave
Paid Holidays
Paid Parental Leave
Health Savings Account/Flexible Spending Account
Commuter Benefits
Team Activity Budget
Company News
NewsBreak, America's leading local news app, has launched SPOTLIGHTS, a programme helping small businesses reach local customers through storytelling. Business owners answer questions to create articles, which are then published on NewsBreak and distributed to the platform's 40 million monthly active users via hyperlocal targeting and push notifications. Early results from 750 participating businesses show strong engagement, generating 76 million impressions, 1.52 million views and over 19,000 shares. One participant, Hello Uncle pop-up restaurant, gained over 200 Instagram followers and sold out events following their article. The programme, available at localbusiness.newsbreak.com, includes one feature article and push notification free of charge. Founded in 2015, Mountain View-based NewsBreak reached unicorn status in 2021.
Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More. The San Francisco-based AI startup Anthropic had already informed the general public that it planned to make an announcement today, Thursday, May 22nd with a livestream scheduled for 9:30 am PT.Many in the wider AI power user community, especially on X, began to theorize that the announcement would mark the launch of a new Claude model codenamed “Neptune,” based on earlier inspection of Anthropic documents and code online, which some took to be a new version of its powerful Claude large language model (LLM) family, potentially the long-awaited “Claude 4 Opus,” a larger-parameter (denoting more internal settings and complexity) model successor to the current Claude 3.7 Sonnet.Now, it appears that Time Magazine has accidentally confirmed that rumor, publishing and quickly removing an article on its website, according to the observations of eagle-eyed AI programmers and news bloggers on X.Someone also appears to have published a full scrape of the Time article online on the news aggregator app Newsbreak, though that too has now been taken offline. The focus of Time’s piece is on Claude 4 Opus’s safety risks and mitigations, but it does reveal that the new Claude is smart enough to potentially help novices create new bioweapons.There are scant specifics about the model size, cost, licensing terms, and performance on commonly used third-party AI benchmarks. For those, we will just have to wait until more information is revealed by Anthropic — or leaked by members of the press and AI community. Daily insights on business use cases with VB Daily
Decentralized intelligence networks could hold the key to making self-driving cars smarter and safer. Many see these vehicles as the future of travel. However, there are still several problems that manufacturers and regulators need to work out.At their core, self-driving vehicles rely on sensors and other data to stay on course, avoid obstacles, and safely deliver passengers to their destinations. These sensors can include LiDAR, radar, thermal imaging, and other advanced systems. All of these systems create a data footprint that can be used to improve the car's performance in the future.Federated LearningOne way that manufacturers have found to improve their vehicles' self-driving performance is to enable their cars to share this data using a system called federated learning. Federated Learning (FL) is a distributed machine learning approach where individual vehicles train models locally and share only model updates with a central server
Embattled Indian FinTech Paytm is reportedly turning to a group of banks for help. The company is likely to work with Aix Bank, HDFC, Yes Bank and the State Bank of India to process transactions though India’s popular unified payments interface (UPI), Reuters reported Monday (Feb. 26), citing two sources familiar with the matter. The news comes as the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), India’s central bank and banking regulator, has asked Paytm’s banking operations — Paytm Payments Bank — to shutter its business
Emtech, a provider of central banking infrastructure, has launched its Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) Innovation kit. According to the firm, the kit aims to support Fintech platforms and various other financial service providers that are looking to experiment with solutions based on virtual currencies that are supported by reserve banks. The New York-headquartered firm has also announced a $4 million investment that was led by Matrix Partners India. The firm intends to continue working on its CBDC technology stack and its Regtech products