Staff Engineer – Ad Monetization

Overview

Staff Engineer (individual contributor, tech-lead track) for a new Bangalore team building Glance's ad monetization platform: the serving architecture, rendering contracts and quality bar behind ad slots on the lock screen and mobile surfaces.

What you'll do

• Design a demand-source-agnostic serving layer with one contract (OpenRTB 2.6 with Glance extensions) that any exchange, ad server or deal plugs into.
• Keep decisioning (auction, floors, priority and ad-load policy) in the platform, never in adapters or partner consoles.
• Define the rendering contract the client SDK depends on (native, VAST, MRAID/HTML).
• Make the big calls and document them: ADRs, latency budgets, and build-versus-use decisions with InMobi platform teams.
• Build ad slots into Glance's content feed, with ad load balanced against dismiss rate, session depth and retention.
• Design for prefetch, including ads fetched ahead of time and shown later, sometimes offline, covering caching, expiry, pacing and delayed impression beacons.
• Own per-user frequency and ad load across all demand sources within latency, battery and memory budgets on low-end Android.
• Run design reviews across serving, SDK, automation and revenue data, and own the API contracts between them.
• Make "what proves this?" the first question on any pricing or serving change, including AI-assisted code: replay evals, invariant checks, auto-rollback canaries.
• Be accountable for integrity gates: creative safety, invalid traffic, policy compliance.
• Review revenue-event and partner-reconciliation design so the numbers hold up to OEM audit.
• Mentor senior engineers into area leads and ensure every service has a second owner.

What you'll need

• 10+ years of experience, including ownership of a low-latency, high-throughput system where a bad deploy shows up as lost revenue (ad serving, payments, trading or pricing).
• Distributed systems depth: partitioning, replication, consistency, failure modes, graceful degradation.
• Deep, hands-on Java and Spring Boot, including JVM/GC tuning for low latency.
• Comfortable in Python (FastAPI) for ML and data services.
• Cloud (GCP or AWS), Kubernetes and CI/CD, designing for cost of serving, not just uptime.
• Event pipelines at scale (Kafka, Spark or Flink), reconciled against an external source of truth.
• Safe releases without a manual pass: contract and replay testing, canaries, automated rollback, SLOs you've been paged on.
• RFCs and ADRs that lead to decisions, and influence across teams you don't manage.

Nice to have

• Sell-side ad tech: SSPs, ad servers, Prebid / Prebid Server, Google Ad Manager.
• OpenRTB, VAST, MRAID and OM SDK; privacy signals (TCF, GPP) and supply-chain transparency (schain, sellers.json, app-ads.txt).
• Android or mobile SDK work under size, battery and cold-start budgets.
• Consent frameworks (DPDP, GDPR, LGPD), invalid-traffic defences, or partner-billing systems that external partners audit.

Details

• Location: Bengaluru.
• Employment: full-time role implied by the Staff Engineer position; not explicitly stated in the posting.