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Salary: USD 160,000 - 180,000 / annual
Chicory is a leading contextual advertising platform for CPG and grocery, reaching 150 million grocery shoppers monthly across 7,000+ websites, food blogs, and apps including The Kitchn, Food Network, and MyFitnessPal. The company powers 70+ leading retailers through direct integrations and retail media partnerships.
As Senior Software Engineer, Backend, you will shape the technology behind this rapidly evolving adtech company, tackling complex, high-impact engineering challenges where strong technical judgment meaningfully influences platform scalability, product performance, and business growth. This is a highly visible role for an engineer who enjoys solving ambiguous problems, owning meaningful technical decisions, and raising the bar for colleagues.
Key responsibilities include:
- Lead backend architecture and strategic engineering initiatives across Chicory's programmatic advertising platform, including ad serving, OpenRTB, SSP/DSP integrations, auction systems, identity and signal flows
- Independently drive complex backend projects from concept through delivery, balancing scalability, reliability, performance, and maintainability
- Serve as technical subject-matter expert on programmatic advertising, translating industry standards and emerging technologies into engineering decisions
- Design, implement, and troubleshoot integrations with SSPs, DSPs, exchanges, and external advertising platforms
- Optimize high-throughput, latency-sensitive systems including auction and ad-serving workflows
- Mentor backend engineers, fostering technical growth and engineering excellence
- Proactively identify architectural improvements, performance optimizations, and system enhancements
- Trace and optimize the end-to-end lifecycle of ad opportunities across Chicory's backend systems and external programmatic partners
- Engage closely with Engineering, Product, Campaign Management, and other stakeholders to align technical solutions with business objectives
- Conduct rigorous code reviews and establish high-quality software development standards
- Innovate on backend tooling, infrastructure automation, and process improvements
- Champion best practices in software design, performance engineering, and reliability engineering
- Monitor developments in programmatic advertising standards, protocols, identity solutions, and industry practices
You will have autonomy to make impact while partnering with a talented, collaborative team that values thoughtful engineering, continuous learning, and building things the right way.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 7+ years of professional backend software engineering experience, including 2+ years working directly on programmatic advertising systems such as SSPs, DSPs, ad exchanges, ad servers, or header bidding solutions
- Hands-on experience with OpenRTB and the mechanics of programmatic auctions, including bid request/response flows, timeouts, floor pricing, and deal types
- Applied knowledge of Ad Tech ecosystem concepts including identity and cookie synchronization, audience targeting, measurement, and the end-to-end lifecycle of an ad request
- Proven ability to design, build, and operate high-throughput, latency-sensitive distributed systems at scale, with strong instincts for service boundaries, API design, asynchronous processing, and failure modes
- Track record of improving system performance and reliability through effective instrumentation, monitoring, load testing, and performance analysis
- Experience integrating complex external platforms and partners, with attention to versioning, data inconsistencies, operational dependencies, and graceful degradation
- Demonstrated ability to independently investigate ambiguous problems across multiple services, identify root causes, and evaluate solution tradeoffs
- Experience leading major technical initiatives from architecture through production delivery, including influencing technical roadmaps and driving cross-team alignment
- Strong mentorship and knowledge-sharing skills, with a history of raising the technical bar of a team through code review, documentation, and architectural guidance
- Ability to connect engineering decisions to business outcomes such as revenue, ad delivery, reach, and customer needs, and communicate effectively with Product and non-technical stakeholders
