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 team
The User Signal team sits at the heart of our in-house advertising platform. We collect, process, and activate user signals — behavioral events, contextual data, engagement history, and identity signals — and turn them into the features and audiences that power ads targeting, bidding, and ranking across the company's ad stack.
The quality of our signals directly determines how well every downstream ML model performs: better signals mean better targeting, higher CTR/CVR, and stronger monetization. We own the full lifecycle — from raw event ingestion and large-scale feature pipelines, to identity-prediction models, embeddings, and online serving — and we close the loop by applying those outputs inside the ads models that consume them in real time.
About the role
We are looking for an experienced Senior Machine Learning Engineer to design and build the data and ML systems that transform raw user signals into production targeting and bidding features. This is a hands-on, high-ownership role that blends ML modeling , large-scale data engineering , and production ML systems .
You will own significant pieces of the signal-to-model pipeline end to end: defining and building features at scale, developing models for user understanding — most importantly identity prediction — and then applying those predictions directly inside the ads targeting, bidding, and ranking models to drive measurable lift. You won't just hand features off to a downstream team; you'll close the loop, ensuring everything is served online with the freshness, latency, and reliability that real-time bidding demands. You'll partner closely with Ads, Data, and Infra teams, and you'll be expected to drive technical direction — not just execute well-scoped tasks.
Responsibilities
Build user-signal features at scale : design, implement, and own offline and online feature pipelines (batch + streaming) that turn raw user events into high-quality targeting and bidding features.
Develop user-understanding models — especially identity prediction : build and improve models such as identity prediction, user/content embeddings, intent and conversion prediction, and signal-quality / value models that feed ads targeting and bidding.
Apply model outputs inside ads models : integrate identity-prediction results and other user signals directly into the ads targeting, bidding, and ranking models — owning the impact all the way to revenue, not just the upstream features.
Own the model lifecycle : data preparation, feature engineering, training, offline/online evaluation, deployment, monitoring, and iteration — with rigorous A/B testing and clear business metrics (CTR, CVR, ROAS, revenue).
Bridge modeling and serving : ensure features and model outputs are available online with the freshness and low latency required by high-QPS real-time bidding, working across feature stores, embedding stores, and serving infra.
Improve signal quality and coverage : identify…