VP Programmatic

Accountabilities

• Take full ownership of the web programmatic engineering domain, including architecture, technical roadmap, engineering priorities, build-or-kill decisions, hiring plans, and budget within established group parameters.
• Lead the technical strategy across client-side auction and rendering, server-side auction and rendering, video advertising technology, consent management, and related programmatic infrastructure.
• Make cross-stack architectural decisions across header bidding, Prebid Server, OpenRTB gateways, bidder integrations, wrapper technologies, and associated services.
• Own the unified technical roadmap for the programmatic domain, translating strategic priorities into practical engineering initiatives and escalating only genuine strategic ties when necessary.
• Drive performance and scalability across the bid path, with responsibility for latency, availability, auction efficiency, and wrapper performance against Core Web Vitals.
• Evaluate and optimize the placement of dynamic floors, traffic-shaping mechanisms, clearing-price models, win-rate models, and viewability capabilities within the auction infrastructure.
• Serve as the primary technical escalation point for complex client-side incidents, monetization challenges, and programmatic engineering issues across the organization.
• Act as a technical representative within the wider adtech ecosystem, including engagement with Prebid, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), industry events, and relevant external partners.
• Own engineering responsibility for consent quality, Transparency and Consent Framework (TCF) and Global Privacy Platform (GPP) purpose enforcement, Digital Services Act transparency signaling, supply-chain integrity, and protections against invalid traffic and made-for-advertising inventory.
• Ensure engineering practices support strong publisher-side quality and commercial outcomes, particularly around privacy, transparency, inventory integrity, and monetization.
• Champion AI-native engineering practices, using agentic development tools and workflows to accelerate engineering while applying strong technical judgment to validate their output.
• Lead through two technical team leads and directly manage the FastCMP engineering team, creating clarity around ownership, priorities, decision rights, and escalation paths.
• Build and maintain a high-performing player-coach culture where technical expertise, ownership, and problem-solving matter more than organizational scale.
• Ensure the programmatic engineering organization becomes increasingly autonomous while maintaining high standards for reliability, performance, technical quality, and delivery.

Requirements

• 10+ years of professional engineering experience with significant senior technical leadership experience in sell-side adtech, such as Chief Technology Officer, Vice President of Engineering, or Head of Programmatic Engineering within a wrapper vendor, Supply-Side Platform (SSP), exchange, or Prebid ecosystem.
• Deep, hands-on expertise with Prebid on both the client and server side, including the ability to understand live auction traces and the technical implications of auction configuration.
• Strong knowledge of OpenRTB 2.6 and the broader programmatic advertising ecosystem.
• Practical experience with Google Ad Manager in the context of header bidding, including line items, price granularity, and Open Bidding interactions.
• Strong understanding of modern sell-side programmatic topics, including client-side versus server-side trade-offs, TCF/GPP enforcement, Digital Services Act transparency, curation, Supply Path Optimization (SPO), Private Marketplaces (PMP), Programmatic Guaranteed (PG), dynamic floors, traffic shaping, and Demand-Side Platform (DSP) query-per-second limitations.
• Strong knowledge of publisher-side performance and Core Web Vitals, including Interaction to Next Paint (INP), Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), deferred auction initialization, code chunking, and third-party script isolation.
• Ability to read, review, and make architectural decisions across a polyglot technology environment including Go, TypeScript/Node.js, Java, PHP, and Python running on Kubernetes.
• Daily experience with AI-assisted and agentic engineering tools such as Claude Code or equivalent, together with the ability to distinguish where artificial intelligence accelerates development from where human technical judgment remains essential.
• Player-coach mindset, with enthusiasm for working closely with a compact engineering organization and personally engaging with complex technical problems.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving capabilities, with a data-driven approach to technical and commercial decisions.
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to explain complex technical topics clearly to engineering, product, commercial, and external stakeholders.
• Fluent English.
• French is considered a plus.
• Experience with large-scale Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) analytics and machine learning deployed within latency-sensitive bid paths is advantageous.
• A visible track record within Prebid open-source projects or IAB working groups is a plus.
• Strong knowledge of publisher-side privacy, consent-string quality, and browser-specific signal loss, particularly across Safari and Firefox, is advantageous.
• Experience with video advertising technologies such as VAST, Connected TV (CTV), or audio monetization is a plus.
• Commercial awareness, ownership, pragmatism, adaptability, and a strong focus on measurable results.

Benefits

• Senior leadership position with end-to-end ownership of a critical programmatic engineering domain.
• High level of autonomy and decision-making authority over architecture, roadmap, engineering priorities, and technical direction.
• Opportunity to work with large-scale programmatic infrastructure processing billions of bidding, bid-request, and analytics events.
• Exposure to a sophisticated in-house advertising technology ecosystem spanning header bidding, Supply-Side Platform technology, video, consent management, and analytics.
• Mostly remote working structure, with in-person presence for key meetings and onboarding activities.
• International environment with colleagues and teams across multiple countries.
• Close-knit, collaborative culture focused on ownership, innovation, transparency, and measurable impact.
• Professional development opportunities, including training, career check-ins, performance feedback, and potential internal mobility.
• Comprehensive health and pension benefits.
• Opportunities to attend industry conferences and participate in relevant advertising technology working groups and events.
• Opportunity to work in an AI-native engineering environment and help shape how artificial intelligence is integrated into modern software development.
• Direct exposure to senior strategic decision-making and the opportunity to influence the future direction of programmatic advertising technology.