AI Engineer, Agentic Ad Creative (Multimodal)

About the Position

AI Engineer, Agentic Ad Creative (Multimodal) Job at News Break, Mountain View, CA

News Break 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.

We're rebuilding our creative pipeline so that something is an agent - one that generates thousands of images and videos a day across Meta, Google, TikTok, Pinterest, Reddit, and Snap; watches CPI and ROAS come back; and gets sharper every cycle. We're hiring the engineer who owns this agent end-to-end.

Responsibilities

• Extend our LLM critic + performance-feedback regeneration from images-only to images + video + copy, all closed-loop, all running unsupervised at thousands of variants per day.
• Build from a topic + product brief to a platform-ready 9:16 vertical ad - script, scene plan, b-roll, voiceover (ElevenLabs / Hedra), captions - in under 90 seconds per iteration, under $0.50 per iteration.
• Pick the right model per brief (Flux Schnell vs Pro, Veo 3, Sora, Runway Gen-3/4, Kling, Hailuo), minimizing $/asset under a quality floor.
• Build a VLM (GPT-4o vision / Gemini / Claude vision) that vets every frame and caption against current Meta / Google / TikTok ad policy before upload.
• Train and ship on past CPI-winning ads. Deploy serverless on fal / Replicate. A/B against base Flux on real spend.
• Build an event-triggered ad pipeline (video) - Earthquake hits at 14:02 by 14:12 you have 50 paused video variants in Meta and TikTok, each with platform-specific aspect ratios and locale-specific voiceover.

Requirements

• Deep understanding of diffusion and video models.
• Ability to name your daily model stack and explain when each wins, where each breaks, and what you’d reach for at $0.01/asset vs $0.50/asset.
• Public artifacts - a fal demo, a Replicate model, a Civitai upload with >100 downloads, a viral X thread of your generations, a ComfyUI workflow on GitHub.
• Scroll-stopping instinct - you know what makes someone not swipe past an ad in the first 3 seconds.
• Cost as a first-class design constraint - $/asset, $/click, $/install. Cost arbitrage between model tiers is something you’ve actually shipped.
• Familiarity with Meta Advertising Standards / TikTok branded-content rules.
• Proven track record as a builder - Idea working pipeline first 100 ads shipped CPI data back tighter loop.

Nice to Have

• Pretrained or significantly advanced a VLM (not just SFT’d or LoRA’d one).
• Open-sourced a ComfyUI custom node, a diffusers extension, or a Replicate model with real traction.
• Deployed serverless inference on fal / Replicate / Modal at scale (>10k req/day).
• Shipped a video product end-to-end: script scene plan b-roll voiceover captions final cut.
• Authored a public take on generative video model failure modes that other engineers cite.

We Offer

• Competitive Bay Area compensation + meaningful equity.
• Unlimited generative model budget - fal, Veo, Sora, Runway, ElevenLabs, OpenAI image, Anthropic vision, Hedra, Kling.
• 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.

About the Company

Founded in 2015, News Break 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.

If you’re inspired to dream big, innovate fast, and make a difference, we’d love to hear from you! For more information, visit News Break.

Apply Now

The US base salary range for this full-time position is $120,000-$220,000 USD. Pay may vary based on a number of factors including job-related skills, level, experience, geographic location, and relevant education or training. At NewsBreak, we design our overall rewards package to attract top talents. Depending on the position, the role may also be eligible for discretionary bonus and options. Your recruiter can share more details during the hiring process.

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