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.
