Lead Software Engineer, Content Ingestion

We’re looking for a collaborative, self-motivated Lead Software Engineer to join our growing Content Ingestion team.

As our Lead Software Engineer, you’ll help design and evolve the systems that ingest, process, and transform large volumes of unstructured content into structured, high-quality data. You’ll collaborate closely with teammates across Product, Search, Data Science, and Platform to build scalable, reliable data pipelines that power core platform experiences.

What You’ll do:

• Design, build, and evolve high-throughput data pipelines that ingest and transform large volumes of unstructured content into structured and enriched datasets
• Drive technical direction and architectural decisions across ingestion systems, ensuring scalability, reliability, and long-term maintainability
• Improve data quality, correctness, and enrichment workflows to support downstream systems such as Search and Data Science
• Build and operate distributed, event-driven systems and streaming pipelines with strong observability and fault tolerance
• Partner cross-functionally with Product, Data Science, Search, and Platform teams to deliver high-quality data that powers customer-facing features
• Mentor and support engineers through code reviews, technical guidance, and knowledge sharing, raising the overall engineering bar
• Identify and lead high-impact technical initiatives, balancing speed of delivery with system stability and long-term health

To be set up for success in this role, you’ll need to have:

• 8+ years of professional experience as a software engineer
• Experience designing, building, and operating distributed systems, data pipelines, or event-driven architectures at scale
• Strong proficiency in Python or a similar backend programming language
• Experience building and maintaining microservices that are reliable, observable, and scalable
• Experience working with streaming technologies such as Kafka, Kinesis, or similar systems
• Experience with APIs and service communication patterns such as gRPC and Protocol Buffers
• Experience working with large-scale data systems or high-throughput SaaS platforms
• Expertise with relational or search databases such as MySQL, Postgres, Elasticsearch, or OpenSearch
• Experience making technical tradeoffs in distributed systems related to performance, reliability, and maintainability

If any of the below also describe you, this could be an exciting opportunity:

• Experience designing or optimizing content ingestion, ETL/ELT, or data enrichment pipelines
• Experience improving throughput, reliability, and observability in large-scale data systems
• Experience with background job processing frameworks and asynchronous workflows
• Experience working on systems that process multi-terabyte datasets or high-volume event streams
• Interest in journalism, media, or the technology that supports those industries

In addition, we’re always looking for candidates who:

• Communicate complex technical ideas clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences
• Take ownership of their work and proactively identify and solve problems
• Contribute to a collaborative and supportive engineering culture through thoughtful feedback and mentorship
• Write clean, maintainable, and well-tested code that scales over time
• Balance pragmatism with long-term thinking when making technical decisions
• Continuously learn and adapt in a fast-evolving technical environment
• Proactively incorporates AI tools into day-to-day work to improve productivity and accelerate delivery

Interview Overview

Here’s what you can expect from our process. We’ll keep you informed at every step and let you know if anything changes along the way.

• Intro call with a member of our Talent Team
• A video interview with the Hiring Manager
• Peer interviews, including a 1 hour peer code interview
• Final conversation(s) with member(s) of our executive team

Location Preferences

We are currently prioritizing candidates based in Bulgaria. Qualified candidates located in the United Kingdom and Ireland are also encouraged to apply.

Travel & Team Engagement Expectations

This role requires up to 10% travel for team collaboration, customer engagements, and company events. As part of our commitment to building strong connections across our fully distributed team, attendance at our annual company offsite (typically held in Mexico) is expected.

Salary

The anticipated salary range for this role in Bulgaria is €28,000 – 34,000+ annually, depending on experience.

Individual compensation decisions are based on a number of factors, including experience level, skillset, and balancing internal equity relative to peers at the company. We expect the majority of the candidates who are offered roles at our company to fall healthily throughout the range based on these factors. We recognize that the person we hire may be less experienced (or more senior) than this job description as posted. If that ends up being the case, the updated salary range will be communicated with you as a candidate.