Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Recommendation & AI Applications

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.

If you’re inspired to dream big, innovate fast, and make a difference, we’d love to hear from you! For more information, visit www.newsbreak.com/about

About the Role

We are looking for aSenior Machine Learning Engineer to help evolve ourlarge-scale recommendation systems and applyAI / LLM technologies to real-world production problems. You will work oncore feed, retrieval, and ranking systems serving tens of millions of users, while also participating inAI-driven innovation projects that explore new ways to improve content discovery, personalization, and developer productivity. This role is ideal for engineers who enjoystrong individual ownership, hands-on development, and translating ideas into reliable systems.

 What You’ll Work On

Large-Scale Recommendation Systems

• Design, build, and iterate onhigh-throughput, low-latency recommendation systems powering NewsBreak’s core feeds.
• Improveretrieval, ranking, and multi-objective optimization to balance engagement, retention, content quality, and business metrics.
• Own systems fromoffline training → online inference → A/B experimentation → metric analysis.
• Identify and resolve issues related todata quality, model drift, and system performance in production.

AI & LLM Applications

• ApplyLLMs and foundation models to recommendation-related problems such as content understanding, user intent modeling, and feature generation.
• Prototype quickly, validate with experiments, and push successful ideas into production.

AI-Driven Development

• EmbraceAI-assisted development workflows, including LLM-powered coding, debugging, and analysis.
• Apply AI across feature ideation, prototyping, and experiment analysis.

0→ 1 Innovation

• Contribute to0–1 AI-powered projects, helping take ideas from early exploration to MVP and production.

What We’re Looking For

Minimum Qualifications - 3+ years of industry experience building machine learning or recommendation systems in production. - Strong understanding ofrecommendation system fundamentals (ranking, embeddings, user/item modeling, experimentation). - Strong coding skills withPython / Java / Scala, and experience withPyTorch or TensorFlow. - Experience working withlarge-scale data and ML systems (e.g., Spark, distributed training, real-time inference). - Ability to own features end-to-end and deliver measurable business impact.

Bonus / Plus Qualifications - Production experience applyingAI or LLMs to recommendation systems. - Experience contributing to0 → 1 AI or ML-driven products. - Familiarity with AI-assisted development tools and workflows.

Benefits

We offer a competitive benefits package:

• Health, dental, and vision care for you and your family (100% coverage for employee)
• Top-tier 401(K) plan with company matching
• Paid time off and paid holidays
• FSA, HSA and commuter benefits programs
• Team activity budget

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