Senior Engineer, Ad Platform

About the Team (Hearst E-Commerce)

Hearst E-commerce is a newly formed organization focused on developing and supporting E-Commerce across Hearst’s consumer media portfolio. Our goal is to make it easier to make it easier to buy all the goods and services our thousands of journalists research every day. We work across a range of focus areas, including building and operating marketplaces, creating performance advertising tools, helping develop editorial tools to simplify content creation workflows. This breadth helps give our team unique perspectives into the needs of Hearst’s reader and viewership across the globe.

As a member of the larger Hearst community, our team is focused on developing a supportive, inclusive culture, and giving back to our communities. Hearst employees have access to extensive training and development opportunities, ranging from robust internship, mentorship, and sponsorship programs to unique opportunities to partner with emerging women-led startups in media, technology and data funded through HearstLab, one of our venture investment groups. Our community support includes the Hearst Foundation, which has overseen more than $1.3 billion in grants to build healthy, productive, and inspiring opportunities, to our corporate donation matching.

Your Impact

The E-Commerce platform team develops a variety of tools for use by Hearst’s collection of publications and stations, as well as new prototypes of new and emerging commerce concepts. Our team works across the entire stack that supports marketplaces and other buying experiences across our media sites. As these experiences grow, we are beginning to expand our advertising products to support commerce-specific experiences. These new products will be a hybrid of retail media offerings common to retailers with traditional performance-based display advertising present in our retail media offerings. 

As a new organization beginning to scale our technical team, we are looking for experienced senior engineers who can assume responsibility for the design and implementation of our emerging ad-tech. Your role will be to partner with other engineers and product teams from within our organization and outside to help execute our technical strategy for a retail media offering intended to reach every Hearst reader and shopper across all the platforms we publish content. We anticipate a hybrid of both internal and third-party services and are looking for technical experience capable of making thoughtful decisions and building scalable ad-tech solutions.

You will work closely with other engineers in the team building our new ad-tech products, and partner closely with multiple platform teams, as well as our data and analytics teams to ensure that we can use the entire spectrum of user interactions to improve the quality and relevancy of our products. 

Since we are in the early stages of building our ad platform, you will be one of the founding members of the team, and you will have the opportunity to develop brand new components from scratch. Your hands-on coding will span developing prototype applications, as well as production code. An ardent desire to learn, work in ambiguously defined product areas, and partner with others is important. 

Your Day-to-Day

• Develop and maintain our scalable Ads platform, including the backend systems and their corresponding control panels across Hearst.
• Implement new features in collaboration with our product and design teams using a combination of internally developed and third-party solutions.
• Employ clean code, simple design, good documentation practices and write reusable and scalable libraries for use across other engineering teams as needed.
• Integrate and use the right testing practices across different development and deployment stages. 
• Help audit and provide constructive criticism for designs and implementations and be open minded to receive feedback.
• Partner with our operations teams to deploy and scale the services that we build. 
• Design and build with security in mind from the beginning and speak up for any security concerns.
• Be willing to provide help for your colleagues and to ask for help when you need it.
• Be both a mentor and a mentee for your peers and the extended engineering team at Hearst.

About you 

No two projects are alike, nor are two candidates. The following experiences are common within your peer group, but not strict requirements. We encourage all candidates with some applicable qualifications to apply.

• 6+ years of experience building scalable and highly available backend systems in one or more programming languages (at least one of Java, Python or NodeJS are required).
• A knowledge of how to scale a small experiment (hundreds of concurrent users)