Distinguished Engineer - Web & Advertisement

theeconomistgroup; Greater London; On-site; GBP 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

The Economist Group is seeking a Distinguished Engineer, Web & Advertising to own the target architecture for the economist.com web platform and the advertising stack. You will align cross-functional teams to a durable technical direction and partner with Head of Product & Engineering, Web, Advertising leadership and domain leads.

You will set architectural direction, balance trade-offs between web delivery and ad tech, and raise the engineering bar across high-traffic systems.

Job description

Who we are

Since 1843, The Economist Group has championed independence, excellence and openness, helping people understand and tackle the critical challenges shaping the world. Today, we are building on that legacy as a global media and information-services company powered by digital innovation, analytical rigour and evidence-based insight.

Across our three businesses – The Economist, Economist Enterprise and Economist Education – we deliver trusted analysis and insights to individuals and organisations in more than 170 countries. United by a shared purpose to drive progress, we empower decision-makers to make sense of change and chart a course through an increasingly complex world.

As a colleague, you will be part of a culture that values ideas, encourages ownership and holds itself to high standards. We invest in people who are curious, thoughtful and adaptable, whether they are launching new products, reporting on global events or harnessing emerging technologies such as AI to improve how we work. Here, fresh thinking is taken seriously, ambition is matched by integrity, and great work is recognised. Working across disciplines, geographies and perspectives, we are united by a commitment to innovation, excellence and creating meaningful impact.

Want to discover more about life at The Economist Group? Follow @EconomistCareers on Instagram to discover the people, stories and opportunities that make TEG unique.

The role

The Economist is consolidating Product, Engineering, Delivery, Design and Quality into a single Technology organisation built around durable, cross‑functional teams aligned to coherent product and platform domains. Alongside the accountable leaders who run each domain, a small number of Distinguished Engineers hold technical authority across them: they set architectural direction, own the hardest technical problems and raise the engineering bar, without line‑management responsibility.

Web is one of those domains. economist.com is where readers discover, subscribe to and engage with The Economist, and where advertising is delivered. The reader experience and advertising need to be designed together, so that each strengthens the other.

The Distinguished Engineer, Web & Advertising role is created to give that combined surface a single senior technical authority: someone who owns the target architecture for the web platform and the advertising stack together, makes the consequential trade‑offs between them on the evidence, and is the most credible engineer in the room on high‑traffic web and ad technology at scale. The role sits at the same level as Head of Product & Engineering and works as the technical counterpart to the Head of Product & Engineering, Web, and to advertising leadership.

Responsibilities

• The role holds technical authority over the web platform and the advertising technology that runs on and alongside it:
• Web platform and architecture: The economist.com stack, rendering strategy (SSR, SSG, ISR, edge), CDN and caching, the design system, and the shared front‑end and back‑end‑for‑front‑end services used across the site.
• Performance and quality: Mobile web performance, Core Web Vitals, accessibility, reliability, security and the technical health of everything shipped on economist.com, including third‑party code.
• Discovery: Technical SEO, structured data and generative engine optimisation (GEO), and how the platform responds to AI‑driven answer engines and changing referral patterns.
• Advertising technology: Ad serving and delivery, header bidding and programmatic integrations, direct‑sold and sponsored formats, viewability, brand safety and ad‑quality controls.
• Consent, privacy and data: Consent management, privacy‑compliant identity and targeting, first‑party data and contextual signals, measurement and attribution, and compliance with GDPR, CCPA and the post‑third‑party‑cookie landscape.
• Experimentation and observability: Feature flagging, A/B testing infrastructure, real‑user monitoring and the instrumentation that measures both reader and advertising outcomes.

The role works across every team that builds on the web or touches advertising, with the Head of Product & Engineering, Web, Engineering Managers, Technical Leads, Advertising Sales and Operations, Marketing, Data, Security, Legal and Editorial as partners. It does not own a team or a roadmap; it owns the technical direction those roadmaps deliver against.

Accountabilities

• Set the web and advertising technical strategy: Define and maintain a single target architecture for the web platform and ad stack, and a sequenced, costed path from today's estate to it, aligned to subscription and advertising strategy and agreed with domain leaders.
• Own the hardest technical decisions: Make or arbitrate the high‑consequence calls on rendering and caching strategy, framework and platform choices, ad‑tech vendor selection, build or buy, and how advertising and third‑party code are loaded. Record them so they can be