2 Contract, Media / Design jobs in St Albans

As our Engineering Director for Ad Serving, you will work side by side with Product, Support, Services, platform partners, and your Ad Serving engineering team to design, build, deliver and operate our ad server. The role is a hands-on player/coach role, involving people leadership, operational management, hand-on development and technical duties, including operational management of the tech behind our global, 24x7 ad serving operation. The role has line management responsibilities of a mix of permanent and interim engineers. As a leader in our Optimization Engineering practice, you'll work with Product, Operations, other Engineering Directors and principal engineers, and our VP Software Engineering, to shape our practice. Additionally you'll coach and support junior engineers, contribute to the evolution of the team's principles, practices, and tools, play a role in shaping our wider platform architecture, and play a significant role in shaping our culture. Our platforms are built with Clojure, employ a polylith architecture, are deployed using CI/CD, heavily exploit automation, and run on AWS, GCP, k8s, Snowflake and more. We serve 9 petabytes and 77 billion objects annually, which amounts to 20 billion ad impressions across the globe. You'll play a leading role in significantly scaling this further WHAT YOU WILL DO

• Lead our Adserving engineering team, overseeing and participating in all stages of development, delivery and operations, together with Product, Support, and Operations.
• Manage our ad server as a product, devising and maintain our strategy, develop and drive execution of our roadmap, and industrialise our ad serving operation.
• Architect solutions that are simple, scalable, reliable, secure, maintainable, and make a measurable impact.
• Develop and deliver new features, maintain our product, and drive growth to hit team KPIs. As a part of this, undertake hands-on development and engineering tasks with your team and other teams, to deliver production solutions.
• Employ and champion modern pragmatic engineering principles, practices, and tooling, including TDD/BDD/ATDD, XP, QA Engineering, Trunk Based Development, Continuous Delivery, automation, DevSecOps, and Site Reliability Engineering.
• Take a leadership role in driving ongoing improvements to our engineering principles, practices, and tooling. Provide support & mentorship to junior engineers, prioritising continuous learning and development.
• Develop and maintain a contemporary understanding of AdTech developments, industry standards, partner and competitor platform developments, and commercial models, from an engineering perspective. Combined these insights with technical expertise to contribute to our strategy and plans, influence product design, shape our roadmap, and help plan delivery., AdTech leadership experience across both software engineering leadership, and adserving / ad operations leadership roles. Deep experience in maturing operational teams, delivery management, embedding DevSecOps principles and practices in operational teams, and leading permanent and interim teams across multiple geographies supporting a 24x7 service.
  
  Proven experience designing simple / scalable / reliable architectures, building, and operating concurrent, distributed systems, solving difficult and novel problems, and leading engineering and operational teams working in this space.
• Proven experience and a passion for developing and operating concurrent distributed systems leveraging k8s, and AWS or GCP. Strong preference for functional programming experience, ideally with Clojure. ClojureScript, JavaScript, TypeScript, React, Java, Python, and Terraform experience highly desirable.
• Proven experience contributing to product strategy development with Product Management teams. Experience in SaaS product engineering and operations highly desirable.
• Proven experience in modern software development and testing practices and implementing these in teams, with a willingness to share, partner and coach engineers, product people, and operations through pragmatic and effective development and delivery practices. Experience in employing TDD, BDD or ATDD highly desirable.
• Proven experience shaping and evolving the principles, practices, and tooling supporting agile, testing/QA, DevSecOps, automation, SRE. Experience in Trunk Based Development, XP, & implementing CI/CD highly desirable.
• A focus on continuous learning and improving, both technically and professionally, in your industry, for you and your teams.
• Demonstrated resilience, with experience working in ambiguous situations.
• Strong English, excellent influencing and communication skills, and excellent documentation skills.
If you are ready to be at the forefront of the AdTech industry, shaping its future, and driving success for both Choreograph and our clients, we encourage you to apply and join our team.

Choreograph is WPP's global data products and technology company. We're on a mission to transform marketing by building the fastest, most connected data platform that bridges marketing strategy to scaled activation. We work with agencies and clients to transform the value of data by bringing together technology, data and analytics capabilities. We deliver this through the Open Media Studio, an AI-enabled media and data platform for the next era of advertising. We're endlessly curious. Our team of thinkers, builders, creators and problem solvers are over 1,000 strong, across 20 markets around the world. ABOUT CHOREOGRAPH OPTIMIZATION We're a Product & Engineering team within Choreograph that's focussed on optimizing the impact that advertising has for audiences and the brands that we work with. We do this by optimising media buying, and employing dynamic creative, to deliver impactful and relevant messages. Getting these to the right audience, on the right medium, at moments and locations that matter, via channels and for a budget that is optimal for the brands we work with, is where we live. This role will work primarily on our Creative Optimization product, an omnichannel dynamic content optimisation (DCO) platform, that enables brands to power ads (e.g. images, videos, copy) across a range of channels (display, social, online video, connected TV) with dynamic data (e.g. location, weather, events) in real-time, turning a single creative concept into thousands of unique stories. We utilise AI to optimize for the best performing content, helping advertisers to tell the right story at the right time, and audiences to see messages that matter. Our culture is based on mutual trust, sharing, building, and learning together. We value simplicity, maintainability, automation, and metrics., Our team consists of 100+ engineers, designers, data, and product people, working in small inter-disciplinary teams closely with creative agencies, media agencies, and with our customers, to develop and scale our DCO platform, a leading digital advertising optimization suite that delivers amazing outcomes for brands and audiences., Choreograph is the beating heart of data inside WPP's media investment group, GroupM, the world's leading media investment company responsible for more than $60 billion in annual media investment. Discover more about Choreograph at www.choreograph.com GroupM and all its affiliates embrace and celebrate diversity, inclusivity, and equal opportunity. We are committed to building a team that represents a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and skills. We are a worldwide media agency network that represents global clients. The more inclusive we are, the more great work we can create together