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
Location: Mountain View, California, United States
About the Role
Our team owns NewsBreak’s first-party monetization stack end to end — from the client, through the auction server, to our in-house ad platform. It’s a small team with wide surface area, which means two things: the distance between the code you write and the revenue it drives is very short, and you’ll own your area outright rather than picking up tickets from a queue.
You’ll be the person responsible for how ads load, render, and behave on iOS — in our own app, in the SDK we ship to third-party publishers, and across the external ad networks we mediate.
What You'll Do
- Build and maintain iOS ad functionality across our app and our publisher-facing SDK
- Own ad rendering and the ad experience: how creatives load, display, and perform, for both rich-media and native formats
- Own viewability and event accuracy — impressions, clicks, and billing signals have to be right, and they have to reconcile with what our partners measure
- Own the client-side mediation layer: how we request, prioritize, cache, and fall back across demand sources
- Integrate and maintain external ad SDKs (Google, Meta, and others) through version upgrades and platform changes, and own the tradeoffs when their behavior conflicts with ours
- Own production health for the iOS ad stack — you’re the person who responds when something breaks, including problems originating inside vendor SDKs you can’t see into. Ad code ships in our app and in our publishers’ apps, so a rendering bug is an app stability problem, not just a bad ad
- Measure your own work — ship behind experiments and be able to show that an experience change didn’t cost revenue
What We're Looking For
- 3+ years of production iOS development in Swift and/or Objective-C. We care more about the depth of what you’ve owned than the exact number of years.
- You’ve owned a meaningful module end to end — design, implementation, launch, and the aftermath.
- Experience with ad rendering standards such as MRAID or OMID — or comparable experience rendering third-party content inside a native app.
- Strong debugging instincts. You can work backward from a crash stack and sparse logs to a root cause without a reliable local repro, and you’re comfortable investigating systems you don’t have the source for.
- Judgment about AI tools. You use AI coding assistants as part of your normal workflow, and you can articulate where they help you and where you override them.
- Comfort with numbers. You’ve shipped behind experiments before and can reason about a metric moving without needing someone to interpret it for you.
- Ownership. On a team this size, work isn’t handed to you pre-scoped — you spot problems, define them, and drive them to done. And you treat “it shipped” as the start of your responsibility, not the end.
- Clear communicator who’s comfortable working directly with product, QA, and other non-engineers.
Nice to Have
- Mediation or in-app bidding experience
- SDK development experience — public API design, backward compatibility, dependency discipline
- Background in feed, video, or other latency-sensitive surfaces
- Familiarity with mobile privacy and consent frameworks
How We Work
We use AI coding tools as part of our normal workflow, and we expect you to. To be clear about what that means: we use them to take the tedium out of the job, not to compress three people’s work into one.
It’s also worth being honest about where they help. A lot of this role — debugging vendor SDKs you have no source for, chasing rendering issues across the native/web boundary, working out what a metric movement actually means — is work the tools are still bad at. That’s the part we’re hiring for. If you enjoy the debugging more than the typing, you’ll like it here.
You’re welcome to use AI tools throughout our interview process, including the hands-on session. The only expectation is that you can explain and defend whatever you submit.
