About Very
(Remote – Canada)
Very is a fully distributed technology firm led by expert problem-solvers who create efficient, scalable solutions that move commercial, industrial, and consumer products from pilot to production in record time.
We believe that real innovation happens in the grind — working shoulder to shoulder with clients who are building the future. Our team thrives on that energy. When we’re not helping clients deliver business-critical outcomes, we’re refining our craft and celebrating what it means to do hard things well.
We’ve built a collaborative, tight-knit culture that thrives in both remote and in-person settings. We’ve won numerous workplace awards over the years, including Great Place to Work certification and recognition from Parity.org as a Best Company for Women to Advance.
Our clients include well-known brands like Vizio, Peloton, Clear, iHeart Radio, and Fellowes — all determined to leverage connected devices and AI to drive meaningful impact. Our job is simple: help them win.
As an AdTech Engineering Team Lead you'll lead a team of 3 to 5 engineers embedded in a client's engineering organization through Very's staff augmentation model, working on programmatic advertising infrastructure. You and your team will work across the ad serving pipeline, from bid request handling through creative delivery, in high-throughput, low-latency environments on AWS.
This is a full-time, long-term role that combines people leadership with hands-on technical work. You'll set direction for your team, own their delivery and growth, and stay close enough to the code to review designs, unblock engineers and step in during incidents. You'll work in the client's codebase, tools and processes, partner day to day with their engineering and product leaders, and stay part of the Very team. At Very, a manager is accountable for both what the team ships and how the team works.
This is not an easy role. You'll work under real deadlines with a client who expects you and your team to be available, proactive and delivering from day one. If you like doing hard things well, you'll fit right in.
What You’ll Be Working On
As the leader of an embedded team within the client's engineering organization, you'll:
Lead, mentor and grow a team of 3 to 5 AdTech engineers.
Plan and prioritize the team's work with client engineering and product leaders, and own delivery against sprint and roadmap commitments.
Guide the design and build of real-time bidding (RTB) infrastructure, including the bid request/response lifecycle, auction logic and win notification handling.
Oversee integrations with ad server platforms, including tag management, creative rendering and VAST compliance.
Set the architecture for AWS systems that scale elastically under variable, auction-driven traffic.
Own the data pipelines for bid stream processing, event logging, reporting, attribution and frequency capping.
Optimize for low latency, high throughput and cost-efficient architecture at volume.
Own the team's production support and incident response, and maintain system health, performance and reliability.
Collaborate across engineering, product and business stakeholders to deliver high-quality outcomes.
Identify and proactively address potential technical or operational risks before they affect revenue or customers.
You and your team will operate in an environment that includes:
Ad Tech: OpenRTB, IAB standards (ads.txt, sellers.json, VAST/VPAID), Spring Serve, header bidding (Prebid)
Cloud: AWS (EC2, ECS/EKS, auto-scaling, CloudFront, S3, Athena/Redshift)
Streaming: Managed Kafka (MSK) or Kinesis
Databases & Caching: DynamoDB, Redis
Infrastructure as Code: AWS CDK, Terraform
DevOps: Docker, GitHub Actions, CI/CD pipelines
Frontend: React, TypeScript
Observability: Logging, monitoring, alerting and production diagnostics
Outcomes
Build a Strong Team: Hire, develop and retain engineers who deliver with minimal oversight and hold a high bar for quality.
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