About Us

Local news is the most trusted source of information in the United States (73% of Americans believe and trust local news compared to ~30% who trust national outlets). Local news, however, is a highly splintered industry that suffers from a staff heavy business model. The model is unable to capture much of the $169 annual ad spend.

We’re looking to change that. At Impact News, we’re creating a single network of outlets that can capture a greater share of corporate ad budgets. And we’re doing it by applying AI to a product that is beloved by Americans, but weighed down by a broken business model.

We have a working demo and funding from a prominent VC. We’re already doing $2.7M ARR with only one employee. Now we need a hands-on CTO to build the production system, own architecture, and grow the engineering team.

What You'll Do

Build the end-to-end platform: data ingestion → AI processing → story generation → publishing
Develop robust scrapers, crawlers, and PDF/OCR pipelines for local data sources
Build multi-step LLM workflows (summarization, entity extraction, fact checks, story generation)
Implement RAG, vector search, prompt flows, and accuracy/safety checks
Create automated publishing tools and lightweight CMS functionality
Own architecture, infrastructure, deployment, and reliability
Hire and lead early engineering team of 2-4; set technical direction

Required Technical Expertise

Core Engineering

7+ years engineering experience; expert in Python and backend systems.
Strong in distributed systems, ETL pipelines, data ingestion, and web scraping.
Experience with GCP, Kubernetes, O11y.
Comfortable building systems from scratch in an early-stage environment.
Experience with JVM languages (Java, Clojure, or similar) a plus for polyglot architecture decisions.

AI / NLP / LLM

Hands-on experience with LLM-powered applications in production.
Proficiency with embeddings, vector DBs, RAG, LangChain/LlamaIndex, and multi-step LLM pipelines.
Strong knowledge of summarization, classification, entity extraction, and accuracy/safety evaluation.
Experience with agentic architectures and multi-agent orchestration frameworks.
Familiarity with ML/AI product development lifecycle (PDLC): experimentation, evaluation, deployment, and continuous improvement of models and prompts.
Experience building CI/CD pipelines that include prompt regression testing, model evaluation suites, and output quality gates.
Ability to design systematic evaluation frameworks for LLM outputs (accuracy, factuality, style consistency).
Track record of preventing regressions across code, prompts, and model updates.

Leadership & Product

Ability to translate newsroom/editorial workflows into technical systems.
Experience hiring and mentoring engineers.
Strong Agile background; experience leading iterative development with continuous delivery.
Proven ability to balance speed with quality in fast-moving environments.

Why Join Us

You’ll be the CTO of a company reinventing local journalism with AI. You’ll own architecture, shape the product, build the team, and have meaningful equity in a platform with major civic and commercial impact. You’ll be the second employee at a startup already generating $2.7M ARR and funded by a prominent Silicon Valley firm.

Salary commensurate with experience. Full Benefits. Unlimited PTO.

Impact News

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