Lead Software Engineer - Content Ingestion Job Ankeny area,Iowa USA,Software Development

Lead Software Engineer, Content Ingestion

Remote (US & Canada)

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 analyse 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 Built In. 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 pipeline
Lead technical design and architecture discussions that improve data processing, scalability, and reliability
Collaborate with Product, Data Science, and Platform teams to deliver high‑quality, structured data that supports customer workflows
Mentor engineers on the team through code reviews, technical guidance, and knowledge sharing
Drive continuous improvement in code quality, testing, security, and performance
Take ownership of project delivery, ensuring initiatives are completed with a balance of speed and stability

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

8+ years of professional experience as a software engineer
Hands‑on experience designing, building, and operating streaming or distributed systems to support large‑scale data workflows
Expertise with Python or a similar programming language
Experience with Django or a comparable web framework (FastAPI, Flask, etc.)
Experience building and maintaining microservices that are reliable, observable, and scalable
Experience with Kafka or related streaming technologies (Kinesis, etc.)
Experience with gRPC, protobuf
Experience operating with large‑scale data systems (multi‑terabyte) or high‑traffic SaaS applications
Expertise with relational or search databases such as MySQL, Postgres, or Elasticsearch/Open Search

If 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 frameworks
Experience scaling systems that handle significant data throughput
Interest in journalism, media, or the technology that supports those industries

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

Have excellent communication skills and can explain complex ideas clearly to both technical and non‑technical audiences
Take ownership of their work, proactively identifying and solving issues without waiting for direction
Foster a collaborative and supportive engineering culture by providing thoughtful, constructive feedback
Take pride in writing clean, readable, and testable code that remains maintainable over time
Balance pragmatism with long‑term thinking, managing complexity and technical debt thoughtfully
Embrace curiosity and continual growth

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
Final conversation(s) with member(s) of…