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
You will build the systems that understand what local consumers actually want — turning raw queries, behavior, and context into structured intent. This means query understanding, user-intent classification, semantic search, and the intent taxonomies and interest graphs that power discovery across local categories. You will bring LLMs into production, not the lab, to make local search and recommendations genuinely understand consumer intent.
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What you'll do
Build query-understanding, user-intent classification, and semantic-search models for local consumer demand.
Design and grow intent taxonomies and interest graphs over local categories and merchants.
Ship LLM-powered features into production for search and recommendations at consumer scale.
Work with embeddings, retrieval, and NLU to connect messy consumer language to local supply.
Define metrics and run experiments that tie intent quality to downstream conversion.
What we're looking for
5+ years as an Applied Scientist or ML Engineer on query understanding, intent, semantic search, or NLU.
Production experience shipping models that serve real users — not purely offline or research work.
Hands-on with embeddings, semantic search, intent classification, taxonomy, or interest-graph construction.
Experience bringing LLMs into production systems.
Comfort working at consumer-internet data scale.
Nice to have
Background at Google Search / Ads quality, Meta, TikTok, Pinterest, DoorDash, Instacart, Amazon Search/Alexa, or Apple.
Built a user-intent taxonomy or interest graph at a consumer internet company.
Consumer-intent or personalization work specifically at a local platform (DoorDash, Instacart).
The US base salary range for this full-time position is listed below. 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.
Annual Base Pay Range
$112,000—$293,000 USD
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