Engineering Manager

About the Team

Sovrn, Inc offers is a suite of products to allow independent creators to stay independent (i.e., “sovereign”) by making an income while serving their audience. Of these products, the Advertising Exchange is the oldest and largest. It’s also probably the most complex. It operates at massive scale, in open market conditions, with sophisticated counterparties.

The Exchange Core team is our largest team, with the largest surface area, with the largest number of stakeholders.

About the Job

As Engineering Manager for the Advertising Exchange Core team, you will be responsible for the technical operation and evolution of our digital advertising exchange, but, as an experienced engineering manager, you likely know that what you’ll really be doing is making trade-offs to solve the most important problems or exploit the most valuable opportunities. 

In this role, you’ll manage a cross-functional team of up to 8 individual contributors. Our development teams fully embrace DevOps so you'll manage a cross functional team of engineers that not only develop the application but code our infrastructure and operate the product.  You'll also work with the team Product manager to balance new feature development with operational work, and technical debit

Ad tech experience is valuable but not required. One thing newcomers to ad tech often appreciate is the ability to operate at massive scale (petabytes of data, 100’s of billions of daily requests) in a company of manageable size. 

What You’ll Be Doing:

• Engineering management and mentorship of a cross-functional team of 6-8, with some contract help
• Collaborate with product, security, compliance, business function leaders to flush out the highest-value changes
• Strategically identify technical debt for retirement, and advocate for prioritization
• In partnership with PM, develop, execute on, and influence the product roadmap
• Track and improve key engineering metrics
• Improve code quality and foster a culture of strong engineering design, delivery and quality
• Work with other engineering leaders to continuously improve the overall development processes
• Hire, on-board, and mentor a diverse team of engineers when the team is ready to grow

About You

Most importantly, you’re energized by the opportunity to demonstrate your, and your team’s, value unequivocally via increased revenue, decreased costs, smoother operations. These are, of course, not the only considerations. We want a manager who can advocate for retiring tech debt that might not have short-term monetary impact directly attached to it.

You are an empathic leader, excellent communicator, strong on managing competing priorities and a shifting landscape. You’re comfortable working with a wide variety of people, and respect the perspectives of those that disagree with you. Above all, you love learning, and sharing what you know.

The successful candidate will have: 

• 3+ years of engineering management experience
• Experience with incident management and workflows
• Experience with (and opinions about) Kanban, Scrum, and Agile development processes
• Experience driving operational maturity (on-call, alerting, monitoring)
• Bachelor’s Degree in Business, Computer Science, or a related field; or equivalent experience
• Demonstrated success in coaching and mentoring others

Bonus Points

• Experience in programmatic advertising
• Experience with cloud migration from bare metal
• Experience with Java, or any JVM language
• Experience with Aerospike

Position Reports to: Director of Engineering, Advertising Exchange

We understand that no candidate is perfectly qualified for any job. Experience comes in different forms; many skills are transferable; and passion goes a long way. Even more important than your resume is a clear demonstration of accountability impact, and the ability to thrive in a fluid and collaborative environment. We expect you to learn new things in this role, and we encourage you to apply if your experience is close to what we're looking for.

About Sovrn

Publishers create the content the world depends on for education, entertainment, and commerce. Sovrn provides products and services to tens of thousands of online publishers to help them grow, operate their business, understand their readership, and manage consumer data. Sovrn is headquartered in Boulder, Colorado with offices in San Francisco, New York, and London. 

With 10,000 customers deploying one or more products across 30,000 websites, Sovrn reaches 200M consumers across more than 3.5B pageviews everyday. Sovrn has been a leader in online publisher technology since its founding, and has been recognized by IAB, JICWEBS, and TAG for its role in combating advertising fraud and promoting pro-transparency initiatives. Sovrn is dedicated to helping content creators do more of what they love, and less of what they don’t.

Sovrn Core Values: Candid, Customer Empathy, Learning, Scrappy, Second Order Thinking

Compensation and Benefits

In accordance with the Colorado Equal Pay for Equal Work Act, the approximate compensation range for this role in Boulder, Colorado is $145,000 to $160,000, including base salary and any related bonuses or commissions. Final compensation for this role will be determined by various factors such as a candidate's relevant work experience, skills and certifications.

Sovrn offers a full slate of benefits from competitive salaries, stock options, medical, dental and vision coverage, short and long term disability, life insurance,11 paid holidays, flexible vacation, commuter benefits, a 401(k) plan and match, and a paid parental leave program.

Equal Opportunity Employer 

Sovrn is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer and provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants regardless of race, color, religion, gender, gender identity, age, national origin, disability, parental or pregnancy status, marriage and civil partnership, sexual orientation, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. Reasonable accommodations will be made to meet the requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act and will be provided as requested by candidates taking part in all aspects of the selection process. 

Recruitment Agencies

Sovrn does not accept agency resumes. Please do not forward resumes to our jobs alias or Sovrn employees. Sovrn is not responsible for any fees related to unsolicited resumes.