Engineering Manager, Ad Server
Summary
GumGum is a global technology and media company specializing in contextual intelligence. For over a decade, we have applied our proven machine learning expertise to extract value from digital content for the advertising industry. The company’s contextual advertising engine, Verity™, comprehends the meaning of text, images and video online, allowing marketers to safely and precisely place ads where people are most engaged. Combining that contextual targeting and brand safety intelligence with proprietary high-impact ad formats, GumGum’s advertising solutions deliver industry leading efficiency, accuracy and performance.
Our Advertising division houses an engineering team consisting of more than 50 engineers, covering a diverse skill set from computer vision scientists to React developers. The Advertising division is the data engine room of GumGum. The team generates more than 50 TB of new data every day, while receiving more than 20 million requests per minute! Our engineers and scientists work on technologies such as Deep Learning, Natural Language Processing, Spark, Kafka, AWS, Big data and React. As part of their role, we encourage team members to present in meetups and to attend conferences. We also encourage them to submit patches to open source projects.
The Manager for the Ad Server team is responsible for the technical operations of our Ad Server technology. The Ad Server software receives 30 million requests per minute and is a highly distributed java web service. This role works with product owners and the engineering team to deliver on priorities for the Advertising business division. Our team currently uses technologies such as Java, Spring, MySQL, Kafka, Dynamodb, ScyllaDb, Redis etc. The role works with highly engaged internal customers to make a significant impact on a key revenue stream for the business.
Responsibilities
- Ad Server Technical Execution
- Design high volume, high traffic web services written in Java
- Engage in technical architecture discussions, solve ambiguous problems, and execute on a solution with a team of engineers across ad server, data, and web engineering
- This role is expected to contribute code to the codebase.
- Mentor junior engineers in technical application, review pull requests and designs created by junior engineers.
- Come up with algorithms to optimize KPIs such as viewability, CTR, Revenue, costs etc.
- People Leadership
- Manage a diverse team of 4 engineers, both remote and in our Santa Monica office, who work on both backend and frontend components of our applications
- Conduct 1:1s, performance reviews, documentation, and hiring
- Evolve our hiring process, on-boarding and training, and leveling up guide
- Advocate for and grow our team’s processes and best practices
- Encourage technical and professional development, and for team members to write blog posts, give presentations, and talk about GumGum’s technology outside of GumGum
- Product Development and Project Management
- Collaborate with Product and internal stakeholders to identify, prioritize and develop new features and improvements for our products, as well as provide support for any stakeholder issues
- Oversee day-to-day activities and deliverables and lead cross functional projects
- Work with other Engineering teams, ensuring requirements are considered and met for cross team projects
Minimum Qualifications
- 1-2 years of experience managing a technology team, either as a Technical Lead or Engineering Manager
- 5 years of experience as a developer with understanding of programming languages, preferably Java and Spring Framework
- Experience working with AWS and distributed systems such as Kafka, DynamoDb or equivalent
- A history of successfully shipping products into production
- Experience coaching and mentoring team members
Benefits & Perks
- Competitive health, vision and dental benefits
- Healthcare including 100% coverage for Employee + Spouse/family
- Dependent care FSA
- Employer-matched 401(k) plan
- Stock incentive program (role dependent)
- Paid parental leave
- Goodly - student loan contribution plan
- WFH monthly stipend
- Anniversary recognition and awards
- Fitness reimbursement and wellness workshops
- Discounted Pet Health Program
- Flexible time off and work schedule
- Stocked kitchen & Everytable Smartfridge
- Dog-friendly HQ office - we love our fur babies! Check us out on Instagram @dogsofgumgum
- Incredible work/life balance with a collaborative and friendly work space
- GumGum Gives Back volunteering opportunities
- Team building lunches and events, and monthly company celebrations
- Virtual monthly team bonding events
Career & Development Focus
- Ongoing learning and development for education opportunities such as webinars, books, classes, relevant conferences and events
- Opportunities to pursue business related side projects and yearly Hackathon
- Highly encouraged to contribute to open source software, including our own open source software
- Environment of learning from peers, including meetups, presentations and blog posts
- Opportunity to work with cutting edge technology
- Life Skills sessions - geared towards the whole life/ health / person
- Leadership Bites Dinner Series - connecting current and future GumGum leaders over great food and meaningful conversation
- Stride - our company council committee to share learnings, give updates and provide feedback to the company regarding initiatives and discussions around diversity, inclusion and equity.
Our Values…
Thoughtful…We listen to understand different perspectives, show everyone respect, and relentlessly seek solutions for our clients (internal and external)
Agility…We are quick, nimble, and change direction gracefully, while maintaining control.
Grit…We bring energy and perseverance to everything we do.
Our Culture...
GumGum recently earned LA’s Best Places to Work Award in 2021 by BuiltInLA, and Inc. Magazine’s Best Places to Work in 2020 and it’s no surprise why. With company-sponsored social hours, annual holiday celebrations and on-site gatherings, GumGummers enjoy a fun, creative and collaborative workplace. We provide ourselves on our strong track record of giving employees the autonomy and support they need to succeed.
Check us out on Instagram: @gumgum