Position Overview:
You have deep experience in programmatic advertising – enough to own the architecture of the systems inside our advertising organization and help set our technical direction, not just execute it. You’ll influence the foundational decisions about how our ad systems are built and how they scale, step into complex implementations to stabilize and simplify them, and turn early client relationships into trusted partnerships through technical work that holds up.
Our teams build the systems behind more than 10 billion ad requests a day for high-traffic media & entertainment and news publishers – this is a demanding, hands-on role. You should have enough range across the advertising domain to architect across it, the depth to be the person other developers come to when performance and reliability are on the line, and the ability to move fluidly between a deep technical conversation with developers and a strategic one with product, bringing everyone along.
Scope of Impact & Autonomy:
- Your solutions are designed to have a positive impact on the entire advertising organization and the broader developer group, not just a single project.
- You own architecture decisions that are difficult or expensive to reverse, and you’re trusted to make them.
- You advise Directors and product leadership on technical strategy, privacy and data-handling frameworks, and where we invest.
Primary Responsibilities:
- Own the architecture. Design, build, and evolve the systems behind our ad stack — high-throughput, low-latency services where performance and reliability are the job, not an afterthought.
- Set technical direction. Influence the foundational decisions about how our ad systems are built and how they scale. Help set the direction, not just deliver against it.
- Untangle the hard problems. Lead the resolution of the messiest issues — real-time bidding bottlenecks, data synchronization drops, broken platform integrations — and provide the breakthrough on work that has stalled for weeks.
- Partner with product. Work directly with advertising product owners to shape what gets built. Explain tradeoffs clearly, push back when something doesn’t add up, and propose alternatives — steering product thinking rather than just taking requirements and shipping them.
- Set the standard. Mentor developers, define what developer excellence looks like in practice, and hold the bar on code review and documentation.
- Advise leadership. Partner with our leadership team on long-term technical strategy and on the privacy and data-handling frameworks that govern how we work.
Technical Expectations:
- Deep, hands-on experience across the advertising domain: OpenRTB and Pre-bid, interfacing with and processing data from identity providers, ad decision services, SSP/DSP partners, and ad stitching services. You may not have touched every one of these, but you should have enough range to architect across the domain.
- Has designed and built data pipelines at scale, and is fluent in the tradeoffs of low-latency, high-throughput systems.
- Can step into an unfamiliar architecture, find the systemic weaknesses, and simplify it.
- Anticipates major technical and regulatory shifts — identity resolution after third-party cookies, privacy-first data handling — and factors them into architectural choices up front.
Client Satisfaction & Business Value:
- The client views you as an extension of their own leadership team, trusting your deep understanding of advertising mechanics, and invites you into the \"inner circle\" of their strategic planning sessions, not just their backlog.
- Positions REDspace as a premier thought leader in the Ad Tech industry, where your presence on an account becomes a critical selling point for securing multi-million dollar media and technology contracts.
- Dramatically increases software business value by mediating between complex programmatic monetization goals and core engineering to balance technical perfection with commercial business constraints.
Compensation:
- The expected salary range for this position is $130,000-$175,000 CAD . (Final placement within the range is at the discretion of the hiring manager, based on relevant experience).
Vacancy Status:
- This is a posting for an existing vacancy on our Web Development Team.
AI & Automated Screening Disclosure:
- We use Workable to help manage our hiring process. This includes automated screening questions to confirm basic eligibility and AI-enabled tools to assist our team in reviewing applications. All final hiring decisions are made by a human recruiter.