VP Programmatic

OpenKrill; United States; On-site; USD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Job summary

Sparteo in the United States seeks an engineering leader to own the adtech domain—Actirise, Viously, Meetscale, and FastCMP—taking the domain from architecture to roadmap with direct CTO collaboration. You will steer a compact team, ensuring scalable, secure systems and a strong technical strategy.

You will manage two team leads for client- and server-side functions, enforce performance targets, and act as Sparteo's technical face with Prebid and OpenRTB ecosystems.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of engineering experience with senior technical leadership in sell-side adtech or similar.
• Deep hands-on knowledge of client- and server-side adtech stacks (Prebid/OpenRTB).
• Proven ability to own a technical roadmap and lead cross-functional teams.

Responsibilities

• Own domain end-to-end: architecture, roadmap, build-or-kill decisions for adtech stacks.
• Lead two team leads across Client-Side and Server-Side rendering and bidding.
• Enforce performance targets (p99 latency) and reliability across 4,000 sites.
• Serve as Sparteo's technical face to clients and industry groups.
• Champion AI-native engineering practices across the engineering org.

Skills

Senior leadership

Adtech engineering

AI-native engineering

Go/TypeScript/Java

Tools

Prebid

OpenRTB

Kubernetes

Go / TS / Java

Job description

Sparteo is an independent suite of AI-powered advertising technologies built on sustainable, sovereign infrastructure.

Since 2018, we’ve been reshaping programmatic advertising to make it faster, more transparent, and more profitable by building the most direct path between publishers and advertisers. But we don't stop here: wherever attention lives, on the web, in apps, on CTV, and beyond, our mission is to monetize audiences, across every device. Our data-driven tech delivers 30% higher revenues for our clients on average than traditional solutions.

Our Solutions: Actirise: the display tech designed for performance FastCMP: the consent management platform specifically designed for business purposes Meetscale: the most advanced SSP for Publishers and Ad Networks Viously: the ultimate all-in-one video tech solution Voxeus: the audio distribution and monetization technology

Behind Sparteo’s growth is a team of 100+ talents across 11 countries, united by a shared ambition to redefine the future of digital advertising. Our dedication has placed Sparteo among the most dynamic tech players in Europe:

• FT1000 ranking – Among the fastest-growing European companies in 2024 & 2025
• The Europas – Featured in the list of 100 hottest startups
• Pixalate Ranking – #1 Web SSP in France with our Actirise solution, overtaking Google AdExchange

These milestones are just the result. What truly sets us apart is how we work: at Sparteo, we don’t settle, we act.

• We are Drivers, not passengers: We take the wheel and own our results.
• We are data-obsessed: Facts guide us, not assumptions, not egos.
• We think as one: Collective goals come before personal wins.
• We trade off: We simplify, prioritize, and go for high-impact results.
• We solve problems: We own challenges and turn ideas into action.
• We say what we do: Radical transparency is how we grow, no fluff, no hiding

Discover our journey, products, and culture on our website.

Bootstrapped, profitable, and answering only to our own P&LOne thing matters more than the rest for this particular role: Sparteo has taken zero external capital. There is no board pushing pivots, and decisions argued on merit and ROI actually stick. The whole chain is built in-house — Flashbid for header bidding, Meetscale as the SSP, Viously for video, FastCMP for consent, plus the analytics behind them. Nothing you own here is somebody else's black box. The numbers, instead of adjectives

• An ad stack built entirely in-house, live on about 4,000 publisher websites.
• Around 37 billion client-side bidding events processed per day.
• More than 50 billion bid requests sent to demand partners every day across our platforms.
• About 45 billion analytics events ingested into our big data storage every day.
• Prebid Server in production in both official implementations, PBS-Go and the Vert.x-based PBS-Java, plus in-house Go OpenRTB 2.5/2.6 gateways.
• Multi-cluster Kubernetes on-premise. Our own IAB TCF v2.2 CMP. An ad-integrity stack covering IVT, creative scanning and ads.txt / sellers.json / schain validation.
• p99 latency and availability SLOs on the bid path, with the dashboards in front of you in week one.

The MissionOur CTO runs web programmatic engineering himself today. You take it over fully. This is a succession, not a support role: he moves to group-level topics, and you own the domain end to end — architecture, roadmap, build-or-kill calls — as his direct strategic partner. The decision-rights split is written down in your first 30 days, and escalations reroute to you from day one, incidents included.

Your domain is the adtech engineering behind our products: Actirise with Flashbid, our header-bidding ad stack; Viously for video; Meetscale, our SSP; and FastCMP for consent. You lead it through two team leads — one for Client-Side Auction & Rendering (wrapper and rendering), one for Server-Side Auction & Rendering (auction, OpenRTB gateways, bidder integrations) — and the FastCMP engineering team reports to you directly. You own the domain's hiring plan and budget within group envelopes. Your escalation and representation role covers the whole company. That is the real span: a compact domain of roughly ten engineers. A player-coach role, where authority comes from expertise rather than headcount. If your next step is building a large organization, this is not your role. If you miss being the person people bring the hard problems to, it is.

Your key responsibilities

Cross-stack arbitration

• The interesting problems live at the seam between stacks: client wrapper versus Prebid Server (page weight versus cookie sync and bid-rate loss), where models sit in the bid path, what the Go gateways absorb versus PBS-Java.
• You make these calls and keep the stacks coherent across Flashbid, Viously, Meetscale and FastCMP.

The programmatic roadmap

• You make the technical and build-or-kill calls across the domain's roadmaps. Product owns commercial priority.
• Genuine ties escalates to the CTO — which should stay rare by design.

Performance and scale

• Latency and availability SLOs on the bid path, and wrapper Core Web Vitals across about 4,000 sites.
• Dynamic floors and traffic shaping already run in production, built inside the Server-Side team. Their placement in the path is your call, with clearing-price, win-rate and viewability modelling as the next step.

Being the escalation point of last resort

• You are the adtech expert of the company: client technical crises and the hard monetization questions from Product land on your desk.
• You are also Sparteo's technical face outside — Prebid, IAB, industry events.

Quality and trust

• TCF/GPP purpose enforcement and consent quality, with FastCMP (our own CMP) in your scope.
• DSA transparency signalling, supply-chain integrity (schain, sellers.json) and MFA/IVT rigor.
• Buyers delist MFA inventory and data-protection authorities enforce TCF, so publisher-side quality is a commercial weapon — and here it belongs to engineering.

AI-native engineering

• Claude Code, agents and workflows are how engineering works here, company-wide.
• You practice agentic development daily and you know where AI accelerates and where it misleads.

Your first 12 months, and how we'll both know it worked

• The CTO is fully out of web programmatic. You are the recognized decision-maker, internally and with clients.
• A unified client and server technical roadmap exists, is yours, and is shipping.
• The bid-path p99 latency and availability SLOs (exact targets are on the dashboards you get in week one) held through traffic growth.
• Your teams practice AI-native engineering by default, with you as the reference practitioner.

Your profile for this job

• Must-have
• 10+ years in engineering, with senior technical leadership in sell-side adtech: ex-CTO, VP Engineering or Head of Programmatic Engineering at a wrapper vendor, an SSP or exchange, or a Prebid-ecosystem player. A buy-side-only background will not fit, because the job is the supply seam.
• Prebid (client and server) and OpenRTB 2.6, deep and hands-on — current enough to read a live auction trace and to know why plcmt and source.schain exist.
• Google Ad Manager where it meets header bidding: line items, price granularity, Open Bidding interplay.
• A current sell-side agenda: client versus s2s trade-offs, TCF/GPP enforcement, DSA transparency, curation and SPO, deal plumbing (PMP, PG), dynamic floors, traffic shaping under DSP QPS caps, MFA and IVT.
• Wrapper performance under Core Web Vitals: INP and LCP budgets, deferred and chunked auction init, ad-slot CLS, third-party script isolation.
• The ability to read, review and arbitrate a polyglot estate (Go, TypeScript/Node.js, Java, PHP, Python) on Kubernetes.
• Daily AI-assisted engineering practice (Claude Code or equivalent agentic tooling) and the will to champion it. This one is non-negotiable.
• A player-coach tempera