Director, Engineering (Ad Tech)
$160,000–$350,000 year
On-siteNew York City, New York, United States or Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Job Summary
Lead the Rainmaker Ad Server engineering team, setting clear technical direction and execution standards across a high-scale, low-latency ad serving platform. Own the engineering strategy and roadmap for ad serving capabilities, balancing near-term business commitments with long-term platform health, scalability, and maintainability. Drive the architecture and evolution of distributed systems that power ad decisioning, auction logic, targeting, and serving reliability at large scale. Partner with Product, Data Science, ML, and adjacent engineering teams to translate business goals into durable technical investments that improve delivery quality and monetization efficiency. Build and develop a high-performing engineering organization by coaching managers and senior engineers, establishing a high bar for engineering excellence through strong design reviews, operational rigor, and incident management. Identify architectural bottlenecks and lead pragmatic changes that increase velocity without compromising system correctness or reliability.
Required Qualifications
- 10+ years of experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems
- substantial experience in backend infrastructure and real-time services
- 5+ years of engineering leadership experience
- experience managing senior engineers and engineering managers
- managing in high-performing technical organizations
- Strong technical depth in low-latency, high-throughput distributed systems
- ability to guide architecture
- ability to make sound tradeoffs in performance, reliability, scalability, and developer velocity
- Experience leading teams responsible for business-critical production systems
- demanding uptime and performance requirements
- Strong background with JVM-based backend systems
- Scala
- fluency in modern service-oriented architecture
- distributed systems design
- Experience with core backend infrastructure such as Postgres
- Redis
- Kafka and/or Kinesis
- cloud-native operational environments
- Demonstrated success partnering cross-functionally with Product, Data Science, ML, and other engineering teams
- delivering complex, multi-team initiatives
- Track record of building strong teams
- mentoring senior engineers
- creating environments where technical leaders can thrive
- Strong operational instincts
- experience driving incident response
- service reliability improvements
- engineering process maturity
- High ownership
- sound judgment
- pragmatic approach to balancing technical quality with business impact
- Experience in AdTech
- ad serving
- targeting
- auction systems
- campaign delivery
- forecasting
- measurement
- Experience leading teams responsible for core ad decisioning
- monetization infrastructure
- Experience with Kubernetes
- Terraform
- related infrastructure and deployment tooling
- large-scale production environments
- Familiarity with experimentation frameworks
- real-time optimization systems
- data-intensive platforms
- improve serving decisions and monetization outcomes
- Experience operating in streaming media
- CTV
- video advertising
- other high-scale consumer platforms
- Toronto
- New York
- Los Angeles
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