Senior Data Infra Engineer
At a glance
Senior Platform & Infrastructure role at NewsBreak. Mountain View · $175,000–$221,000 base.
devopsroles summary, based on the employer's posting.
What you'll do
- Build and run Kafka streams that move clicks, reads, impressions and shares from mobile apps to analytics and warehouse systems
- Create and tune Spark jobs for content intake, engagement rollups and user features across very large datasets
- Keep pipelines dependable with data checks, freshness tracking, anomaly alerts, backfills and clear freshness and completeness targets
- Shape data models for analytics and product needs, and guide teams away from schema choices that create downstream problems
- Cut compute expense and job delays, improve shared pipeline tools and patterns, and coach junior engineers
What you bring
- At least five years in data engineering, including three years responsible for live pipelines in distributed systems
- Hands-on Spark and Kafka expertise at scale, including investigating production incidents in both
- Experience with Hadoop, Presto or Trino, and Flink, plus strong Python and SQL skills
- A computer science degree or equivalent background, and a record of measurable gains in data-system efficiency, scale or stability
Who this fits
This is a senior engineering role for someone who can own production data systems end to end and make infrastructure decisions across application and platform teams. The position is based in Mountain View.
From the employer
About NewsBreak
Local life runs on local information. What happened down the street? Who can fix this? Where should we go tonight? NewsBreak started in 2015 to answer these questions, and today more than 40 million people a month rely on us to follow what’s going on in their zip code.
Three platforms with one vision: powering local life. Led by founder and CEO Jeff Zheng, NewsBreak is our local life and news platform; Nearby AI connects people with local businesses; and NDot AI helps publishers and creators grow and earn.
Building for the long term. A $115 million Series C made us a unicorn in 2021, and we keep investing in our people. We’re Great Place to Work® certified and named to Fast Company’s Best Workplaces for Innovators (2025) and Fortune’s Best Workplaces in the Bay Area™ (2026).
Everyone makes an impact. Whether you write code, shape products, tell our story, or run the business, we want people who own projects end to end, stay curious, and speak up. Join us.
Learn more at: NewsBreak, Nearby AI, NDot AI
About the Role
NewsBreak reaches tens of millions of users every day. Every feed ranking decision, every recommendation, every A/B test, and every ML model we ship runs on the data infrastructure you'd own. We're looking for a senior engineer to build and scale the batch and streaming pipelines at the core of that platform — someone who takes end-to-end ownership, drives reliability, and can translate ambiguous business needs into production-grade data systems.
Responsibilities
- Own the streaming data backbone — design and operate high-throughput Kafka pipelines carrying user events (clicks, reads, impressions, shares) from mobile clients through to downstream consumers: the data warehouse and real-time analytics.
- Build and maintain batch pipelines at scale — author and optimize Spark jobs processing billions of rows daily: content ingestion, engagement aggregation, and user-level feature computation. Own pipeline reliability, incremental backfill strategies, and cost per TB processed.
- Drive pipeline observability — instrument data quality checks, freshness monitors, and anomaly alerts so issues are caught before they reach dashboards. Define SLOs for data freshness and completeness, and own them.
- Model structured and unstructured data — design data models that serve analytics and product use cases. Act as the data POC across teams and be the person who pushes back when a schema decision will hurt us six months later.
- Partner with data scientists and platform engineers — understand data needs across teams and drive key data infrastructure decisions. Unblock downstream teams without becoming a ticket queue.
- Improve efficiency — reduce compute costs and job latency through query optimization, smarter partitioning, better resource scheduling, and tiered storage strategies.
- Raise the platform bar — contribute to shared infrastructure: pipeline framework standards, orchestration patterns (Airflow), reusable Spark libraries, and data catalog hygiene. Mentor junior engineers on the team
Requirements
- 5+ years of data engineering experience, with at least 3 years owning production pipelines in a distributed data environment.
- Strong hands-on experience with Spark and Kafka at scale — you've debugged a production incident in both, not just run tutorials.
- Experience with big-data technologies including Hadoop, Presto/Trino, and Flink.
- Proficiency in Python and SQL; Scala a plus.
- Experience working in a cloud environment, preferably AWS (S3, EMR, Glue, Redshift).
- Track record of improving efficiency, scalability, and stability of data systems — with measurable results.
- BS or MS in Computer Science or equivalent.
- Strong communication skills; comfortable driving data infrastructure decisions across application and platform teams.
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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