Ads Lead

Circle Labs; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 230,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive pay and equity

Health, dental, and vision coverage

Access to frontier AI Engines

Job summary

Circle Labs in San Francisco is seeking a skilled backend engineer to lead the advertising systems powering shapes.inc within collaborative conversations. You will own the engineering behind ad serving, partner integrations and measurement, shaping fast, reliable delivery while respecting user data boundaries.

Collaborate with design, product and research to improve sponsored experiences, monitor quality, and drive business results across conversations.

Qualifications

• Experience owning production backend services and taking responsibility for their reliability after launch.
• Strong software engineering skills with an understanding of asynchronous work, data consistency, retries and external API failures.
• Ability to define a technical plan, make practical tradeoffs and work directly with engineers, designers and external partners.
• Confidence using operational and product data to diagnose problems and judge whether a change helped.
• Care for the details of consumer experiences, including latency, clear sponsored presentation and the boundaries around user data.

Responsibilities

• Set the technical direction for advertising and carry projects from design through launch, measurement and ongoing operation.
• Build and maintain partner integrations, creative delivery and serving services that handle timeouts, empty responses and repeated requests correctly.
• Make ad delivery work reliably inside conversations with multiple people and shapes, including concurrent messages, refreshes and reconnects.
• Improve the accuracy of impression, click and revenue reporting, and investigate differences between internal events and partner results.
• Work with design, product, and research to explore sponsored discovery and commerce experiences that help groups compare options and make plans together, evaluating usefulness, clear sponsored presentation, and business results.
• Handle user data carefully across ad delivery and partner integrations, and make changes observable, testable, and reversible.

Skills

Backend ownership

Async programming

Technical planning

Data-driven decisions

Data privacy focus

Job description

About Circle Labs

Circle Labs is the company behind shapes.inc, a place to collaborate. We’re building multiplayer AI: shapes are collaborative assistants that take part in group conversations and do things with you and your people. Our next work includes helping groups set shared goals, delegate to specialist shapes and external agents, and follow progress through to completion. Making things, figuring things out, and sharing plans give people more reasons to spend time together.

We’re a small team in San Francisco. We use the product every day, talk to users, and work across design, engineering, and research.

About the role

Build the advertising systems that support shapes.inc, where people spend time and do things with friends and collaborative assistants. Working with our team in San Francisco, you will own the engineering behind ad serving, partner integrations and measurement. The challenge is to make sponsored experiences relevant to a shared conversation while keeping messaging fast, delivery dependable and the product useful to the people in it.

What you’ll do

• Set the technical direction for advertising and carry projects from design through launch, measurement and ongoing operation.
• Build and maintain partner integrations, creative delivery and serving services that handle timeouts, empty responses and repeated requests correctly.
• Make ad delivery work reliably inside conversations with multiple people and shapes, including concurrent messages, refreshes and reconnects.
• Improve the accuracy of impression, click and revenue reporting, and investigate differences between internal events and partner results.
• Work with design, product, and research to explore sponsored discovery and commerce experiences that help groups compare options and make plans together, evaluating usefulness, clear sponsored presentation, and business results.
• Handle user data carefully across ad delivery and partner integrations, and make changes observable, testable, and reversible.

What you’ll bring

• Experience owning production backend services and taking responsibility for their reliability after launch.
• Strong software engineering skills, with an understanding of asynchronous work, data consistency, retries and external API failures.
• Ability to define a technical plan, make practical tradeoffs and work directly with engineers, designers and external partners.
• Confidence using operational and product data to diagnose problems and judge whether a change helped.
• Care for the details of consumer experiences, including latency, clear sponsored presentation and the boundaries around user data.

Nice to have

• Experience with advertising delivery, monetization, attribution or partner integrations.
• Experience building messaging, social or other real-time consumer products.
• Familiarity with contextual relevance, recommendation systems or evaluating generated content.

Benefits

• Competitive pay and equity
• Health, dental, and vision coverage
• Access to frontier AI Engines