Lead Software Engineer, Content Ingestion

Muck Rack is the leading SaaS platform for public relations and communications professionals. Our mission is to enable organizations to build trust, tell their stories, and demonstrate the unique value of earned media. Muck Rack’s AI-powered, comprehensive, and integrated platform streamlines the PR workflow to help businesses generate positive media coverage, monitor mentions to manage brand reputation, and analyze PR’s impact on business outcomes. By combining media database, monitoring, and reporting into one dynamic platform, we empower teams to collaborate seamlessly, pitch effectively, and analyze results faster and more efficiently.Founder-controlled, fully distributed, and growing sustainably, Muck Rack has received several awards for its unparalleled culture and product from organizations like Inc., Quartz, G2, and BuiltIn. We value resilience, transparency, ownership, and customer devotion, and infuse these values into everything we do. We're looking for a collaborative, self-motivated Lead Software Engineer to join our growing Content Ingestion team. As our Lead Software Engineer, Content Ingestion, you’ll help design and evolve the systems that transform high volumes of unstructured data into valuable insights for our customers. You’ll collaborate with teammates across Product and Engineering to scale our content pipeline and ensure our platform remains fast, reliable, and data-rich.What You’ll do:Design, build, and maintain the core systems that power Muck Rack’s content ingestion pipelineLead technical design and architecture discussions that improve data processing, scalability, and reliabilityCollaborate with Product, Data Science, and Platform teams to deliver high-quality, structured data that supports customer workflowsMentor engineers on the team through code reviews, technical guidance, and knowledge sharingDrive continuous improvement in code quality, testing, security, and performanceTake ownership of project delivery, ensuring initiatives are completed with a balance of speed and stabilityTo be set up for success in this role, you’ll need to have:8+ years of professional experience as a software engineerHands-on experience designing, building, and operating streaming or distributed systems to support large-scale data workflows,Expertise with Python or a similar programming languageExperience with Django or a comparable web framework (FastAPI, Flask, etc.)Experience building and maintaining microservices that are reliable, observable, and scalableExperience with Kafka or related streaming technologies (Kinesis, etc)Experience gRPC, protobufExperience operating with large-scale data systems (multi-terabyte) or high-traffic SaaS applicationsExpertise with relational or search databases such as MySQL, Postgres, or Elasticsearch/OpenSearchIf any of the below also describe you, this could be an exciting opportunity:Experience designing or optimizing content pipelines or distributed data workflows (converting unstructured to structured and enriching)Experience with background job processing frameworksExperience scaling systems that handle significant data throughputInterest in journalism, media, or the technology that supports those industriesIn addition, we’re always looking for candidates who:Have excellent communication skills and can explain complex ideas clearly to both technical and non-technical audiencesTake ownership of their work, proactively identifying and solving issues without waiting for directionFoster a collaborative and supportive engineering culture by providing thoughtful, constructive feedbackTake pride in writing clean, readable, and testable code that remains maintainable over timeBalance pragmatism with long-term thinking, managing complexity and technical debt thoughtfullyEmbrace curiosity and continual growthInterview OverviewHere’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 TeamA video interview with the Hiring ManagerPeer interviews, including a 1 hour peer code interviewFinal conversation(s) with member(s) of our executive teamSalaryWe offer a competitive salary range aligned with local market value. The base salary for this role in Bulgaria is between 101,000- 119,000 EUR.Total compensation for this role consists of base salary, a quarterly bonus plan, and equity. For all other countries, we have competitive pay bands based on market standards.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