Minimum qualifications:

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, including 2+ years leading teams or major initiatives.
• Strong with TypeScript/Node.js and/or Python; experience designing and operating distributed systems.
• Cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP), containers, IaC, and CI/CD; solid grasp of caching and performance tuning.
• Datastores such as Postgres, Redis, Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, and a vector DB (e.g., Pinecone/pgvector).
• Building and monitoring production services with alerting, dashboards, and on-call rotation.

Preferred qualifications:

• RAG pipelines, embeddings, and evaluation frameworks for LLM quality/safety.
• Event streaming (Kafka/PubSub), real-time feeds, and content integrity/provenance.
• Personalization/recommendation systems; experimentation frameworks (A/B, feature flags).
• Security practices for media/news platforms; compliance-minded development.
• Experience in consumer media, news, or high-traffic content platforms.

About Held Accountable

Held Accountable is an AI-powered, news-first platform that makes getting trustworthy information effortless—no noise, no spin. We use AI to generate concise news briefs, power real-time polls, and surface actionable insights so audiences can understand what matters fast.

About the role

We’re hiring a Senior Engineering Lead to own the technical roadmap and lead a small, high-impact team building our core platform: real-time news ingestion, AI summarization, polling, personalization, and analytics—hardened with reliability, safety, and speed. You’ll stay hands-on while setting standards for architecture, code quality, and delivery.

How we work

We ship quickly, test rigorously, and instrument everything. We value clear writing, lightweight processes, and ethical AI. You’ll partner tightly with Product and Editorial to turn breaking news into dependable features.

What success looks like (first 90 days)

• Ship a resilient ingestion → RAG/LLM → publish pipeline with p95 < 1.5s end-to-end latency.
• Launch polls & insights v2 with improved participation and +X% D7 retention.
• Stand up observability (tracing, logs, metrics) with SLOs and an on-call playbook.
• Document a platform architecture and engineering style guide adopted by the team.

How to apply

Send your resume/GitHub/portfolio to contact@held-accountable.com with subject Senior Engineering Lead – [Your Name].

Responsibilities

• Lead architecture and delivery for news ingestion, summarization (LLMs/RAG), polling, insights, and notifications.
• Design scalable, low-latency services and APIs; drive reliability (SLOs, error budgets, incident response).
• Own data pipelines: crawling/feeds, deduping, enrichment, provenance, and safety/quality guardrails.
• Implement LLM integrations (prompting, evals, fallbacks) with cost controls and red-teaming practices.
• Establish engineering standards: code review, testing strategy, CI/CD, versioning, and release management.
• Mentor engineers; plan roadmaps; manage execution with measurable outcomes.
• Partner with Product/Editorial on requirements; translate user needs into clear technical specs.
• Implement privacy/security best practices (PII handling, access controls, audit trails).
• Drive observability (tracing, metrics, logs) and capacity planning for traffic spikes during breaking news.