The Great Place to Work Certification depends entirely on genuine employee feedback. NewsBreak’s results highlight its collaborative, caring, and trustworthy culture – with scores exceeding 86% across all of these dimensions and topping 90% in key areas related to community and justice.
These values are particularly important in a technology company, since they encourage cooperative innovation that moves quickly toward shared goals.
“Our culture is the foundation of our long-term strategy. With integrity, camaraderie, and a growth mindset, we’ve built NewsBreak from the ground up over the past decade. It’s incredibly satisfying to see these attributes rated highly by our team as we work together to build the infrastructure for the content economy,” NewsBreak founder Jeff Zheng said. “I’m so proud of our team, and so grateful for their dedication and the trust they’ve placed in our shared vision.”
Earning a Great Place to Work Certification from the global authority on workplace culture is a major achievement and an affirmation of sustainable growth. Companies that earn the validation have been shown to outperform their competitors on recruitment and retention, productivity and innovation, and financial performance.
“With the vast majority (84%) of the team describing NewsBreak as a great place to work, based on a higher-than-average response rate of 76%, we have set a very high bar in our first benchmark survey,” Jeff Zheng, Founder and CEO of NewsBreak said. “What’s even more important is that we view this as a starting point for continuous improvement. We’ll use what we’ve learned from colleagues’ feedback to make NewsBreak an even better place to work.”
At the heart of the NewsBreak culture is the democratization of ideas – the belief that innovation can emerge from any corner of the organization. From the start, Jeff Zheng established a decentralized management model for NewsBreak, empowering independent teams to own their products, solutions, or business areas and operate autonomously with the backing of dedicated engineering resources. Employees have the freedom to contribute to multiple teams, and regular all-hands sessions bring everyone together to discuss tech trends and share their own challenges and breakthroughs.
Emily Okabe, a Stanford University Computer Science master’s candidate and summer 2025 intern with NewsBreak’s natural language processing team, has experienced firsthand how this flat organizational structure empowers even the newest team members.
“I’m working on state-of-the-art AI projects that I didn’t expect to touch as an intern – even deploying features within my first few weeks. The amount of trust that my manager and teammates have shown me since day one has boosted my confidence as an engineer,” she said.
Leading the multi-modal AI team at NewsBreak, Fei Tao leverages the company’s empowering culture to enable innovation at startup speed and enterprise scale. With a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Dallas and experience at Amazon and Uber, he brings a unique perspective on how different organizational cultures drive results.
“As part of the NewsBreak team, you get to see the big picture in a way that’s just not possible in a large corporation. That’s inspiring! And we are agile, too, so when you have an idea, you can make it happen. We don’t wait months or quarters to deliver results; we move in weeks,” he explained. (Read more about Fei’s leadership approach here.)
NewsBreak is currently hiring innovative technologists, product designers, and business leaders who are seeking accelerated professional growth as they think big, move fast, and create real-world impact.
