Since 2014, Acast has been creating the world’s most valuable podcast marketplace, building the technology which connects podcast creators, advertisers and listeners. Its marketplace spans more than 135,000 podcasts, 2,700 advertisers and c.1 billion quarterly listens. 

Crucially, those listens are monetized wherever they happen - across any podcasting app or other listening platform. The company operates worldwide and is headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden. Acast is listed on the Nasdaq First North Premier Growth Market.

About the role

In just a few seconds, Acast’s Dynamic Ad Insertion platform dynamically sources, selects, and splices ads into uniquely personalised streams for millions of listens every day, all while optimising towards the best possible return for the creator, advertiser, and of course the listener themselves.

As the Engineering Manager for Ad Delivery, you’ll be working on Acast’s own ad server, integrations with third-party ad servers, and our rapidly evolving yield optimisation platform to make the most of every listen and campaign. To do this you’ll also be tapping into Acast’s audience indexing and contextual targeting capabilities, owning and managing our monetisation management tools, and providing core business data sources to teams around Acast to enable payouts, insights, and metrics.

Your responsibilities are to ensure sustainable successful delivery of your team’s products, through your own direct contribution, team leadership, and management of team processes and planning. Through a tight collaboration with your partner Product Manager, you will be the engine of progress towards the goal of matching as much monetisable inventory with the best possible ads in the most valuable manner possible.

What you´ll do

You’ll directly manage a highly skilled and experienced team of software and data engineers, distributed across Europe. You’ll be responsible for their individual growth and performance on an ongoing basis, providing frequent feedback, solid development plans, and insightful reviews. You’ll work with your team every day, and sync with them individually every week, building a close relationship based on trust to help everyone do their best work.

You’ll elevate your team to take ownership and exercise autonomy judiciously in order to best deliver against the team’s objectives, but also be ready to step forward and lead directly when needed. You will organise the team’s work and staffing to match capacity against demand, ensuring its long-term health and effectiveness. You’ll think creatively when approaching ambitious goals across a wide range of product capabilities so that progress is made in a sustainable, lean manner, nurturing just enough process to do the job well.

Working as a member of the team, you will directly contribute to the development of the team’s tech stack, in whichever form best suits your skillset and needs of the day. Whether you’re writing code, testing features, handling operations, or supporting colleagues from around the business, we believe engineering leaders are most effective when they’re hands-on day-to-day. You’ll contribute to the design of systems and architectures, and work alongside other engineering leads and senior engineering staff to produce solutions spanning the entire Acast platform.

Stellar results require close, productive collaboration between people and teams, which you will take a front seat in facilitating. You’ll readily develop relationships across teams, knowing the best people to include at the right moment. You’ll foster an open and productive dialogue between your team and their stakeholders, inside and out, ensuring that we deliver the right thing, on time, on a stable and scalable foundation.

Who you are

You will have a past where you’ve “done it all” - from building small features through to designing architectures, you’ll know what it takes to produce great software. You will have experience of developing and maintaining large back-end architectures designed for scale and high availability, and have actively supported operations both in- and out-of-hours. At heart you’ll still be an engineer excited by new tools and techniques, but have the experience to understand how and when to introduce them.

You may not have managed people directly before but you will have been a leader amongst your peers. You’re used to being the most senior or experienced engineer in the room most of the time, but know how to leave space for others and amplify their ideas. You’ll feel equally comfortable working with a junior engineer in their first role, or a staff engineer with decades under their belt. You’ll bring empathy, a healthy balance of critical and supportive engagement to the work of others, and a positive mindset to motivate those around you.

Communication will probably be your strongest skill, knowing how to bring people in with honesty, clarity, and accuracy - whether you’re explaining tech to non-technical senior leadership or debugging production software with engineers.

The role of Engineering Manager leans on a huge range of skills, applied in a diverse set of contexts. You will relish an opportunity to do new things but also act as the servant leader, readily taking on the work that is needed most, not just the most appealing. You will know how to grow yourself and others, and enjoy the variety of the role over time. You’ll improve the groups you work within by amplifying their strengths while filling the gaps. Most of all, you’ll want to do the best job you can, and help others do the same.

Plus points in experience include:
Cloud architecture (particularly AWS), TypeScript, online ad industry standards (VAST, OpenRTB), back-end service development, high-volume API development, serverless batch processing, devops.

Where you will be

The team works remotely for the most part, with members based in a few European countries and a concentration in Stockholm where in-person collaboration is possible in our offices. The “core hours” for team collaboration are generally 1000-1600 CET.

Where? For this role, we are looking within Sweden. 

Culture & DEI

Acast is committed to creating a diverse environment and is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, national origin or any of the other wonderful characteristics that make us different.

Culture is our number one priority as a business. We believe people come first, and we work every day to enable autonomy, continuous improvement and bring out the best in people. We’re global and have remote teams, so it’s even more important that we strive for an open, inclusive and caring environment where everyone feels visible and welcome. 

We consider ourselves a modern organization driven by strong values to create the best, most fulfilling and nurturing culture.

We very much look forward to finding the next great person to join our cause!