Engineering Manager I
stackadapt • Canada; United States
Posted: July 7, 2026
Job Description
About the Team:
The Creative team manages all aspects of the creatives pipeline at StackAdapt, from serving creatives on bid requests to dynamic creative selection, creative approval and audit workflows, and applying complex business rules. We interact with several downstream services and stakeholders, including Bidding, Data Science, and Product.
Our systems are built in Golang and handle millions of requests per second with an SLA of 100ms. We leverage AWS, Kubernetes, Kafka, Aerospike, and other modern tools and databases. We are a software services team, not a data engineering team.
Watch our talk at Amazon Tech Talks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRqu-a4gPuU
StackAdapt is a Remote First company; we are open to candidates located anywhere in Canada or the United States for this position.
What You'll Be Doing:
- Lead a team of backend engineers who own the creative pipeline, supporting their day-to-day execution and removing blockers so the team ships reliably.
- Execute on roadmap milestones defined with Product and senior engineering leadership; break initiatives down into well-scoped sprints and track delivery, flagging risks and delays to stakeholders early.
- Run the team's agile rituals (stand-ups, planning, retros) and continuously monitor sprint health — velocity, workload balance — to prevent burnout and keep commitments realistic.
- Conduct regular 1:1s, give timely tactical feedback, build psychological safety, and support engineers in executing on their growth plans; surface performance concerns to leadership early.
- Stay close to the technology: participate in code reviews and architecture discussions, uphold coding and testing standards, and help the team make sound, scalable component-level design decisions.
- Coordinate with peer teams (Bidding, Data Science, Product) on immediate cross-team dependencies affecting creative serving and selection.
- Participate in incident resolution and support the team's on-call rotation; ensure production issues are followed through to root cause.
- Participate in interviews and provide hiring feedback; help onboard new team members smoothly.
- Encourage adoption of approved AI tooling (code generation, debugging, documentation) to raise team velocity.
- Model StackAdapt's values in daily work and foster a culture of trust, transparency, and technical excellence.
What You'll Bring to the Table
- Experience in adtech or martech, experience with (and not exclusively to) creative serving in a programmatic advertising space, understanding of different advertising channels and how they work together to serve creatives to users.
- Experience with Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO), and ad markup and rendering.
- 1+ years of people management experience, or 2+ years as a tech lead / mentor for a backend team, with a desire to grow into a career manager.
- 5+ years of backend development experience in distributed systems, microservices, and high-throughput, low-latency services.
- Proficiency in at least one backend language (Golang preferred; Java, Kotlin, C++, Rust, or similar).
- A hands-on leadership style — comfortable reviewing code, debating architecture, and diving into production incidents alongside the team.
- Strong grasp of computer science fundamentals, data structures, and algorithms.
- Working knowledge of modern development methodologies (Scrum, Kanban) and a track record of delivering on committed milestones.
- Clear, transparent communication with both technical teams and non-technical stakeholders (Product, Project Management).
- Hands-on experience with our stack.
Nice to Have:
- Frontend development experience, understanding of web technologies and how creatives are served and rendered in the browser, and frontend device.
- Experience operating systems under global compliance and privacy frameworks.
Additional Content
About the Team:
The Creative team manages all aspects of the creatives pipeline at StackAdapt, from serving creatives on bid requests to dynamic creative selection, creative approval and audit workflows, and applying complex business rules. We interact with several downstream services and stakeholders, including Bidding, Data Science, and Product.
Our systems are built in Golang and handle millions of requests per second with an SLA of 100ms. We leverage AWS, Kubernetes, Kafka, Aerospike, and other modern tools and databases. We are a software services team, not a data engineering team.
Watch our talk at Amazon Tech Talks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRqu-a4gPuU
StackAdapt is a Remote First company; we are open to candidates located anywhere in Canada or the United States for this position.
What You'll Be Doing:
- Lead a team of backend engineers who own the creative pipeline, supporting their day-to-day execution and removing blockers so the team ships reliably.
- Execute on roadmap milestones defined with Product and senior engineering leadership; break initiatives down into well-scoped sprints and track delivery, flagging risks and delays to stakeholders early.
- Run the team's agile rituals (stand-ups, planning, retros) and continuously monitor sprint health — velocity, workload balance — to prevent burnout and keep commitments realistic.
- Conduct regular 1:1s, give timely tactical feedback, build psychological safety, and support engineers in executing on their growth plans; surface performance concerns to leadership early.
- Stay close to the technology: participate in code reviews and architecture discussions, uphold coding and testing standards, and help the team make sound, scalable component-level design decisions.
- Coordinate with peer teams (Bidding, Data Science, Product) on immediate cross-team dependencies affecting creative serving and selection.
- Participate in incident resolution and support the team's on-call rotation; ensure production issues are followed through to root cause.
- Participate in interviews and provide hiring feedback; help onboard new team members smoothly.
- Encourage adoption of approved AI tooling (code generation, debugging, documentation) to raise team velocity.
- Model StackAdapt's values in daily work and foster a culture of trust, transparency, and technical excellence.
What You'll Bring to the Table
- Experience in adtech or martech, experience with (and not exclusively to) creative serving in a programmatic advertising space, understanding of different advertising channels and how they work together to serve creatives to users.
- Experience with Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO), and ad markup and rendering.
- 1+ years of people management experience, or 2+ years as a tech lead / mentor for a backend team, with a desire to grow into a career manager.
- 5+ years of backend development experience in distributed systems, microservices, and high-throughput, low-latency services.
- Proficiency in at least one backend language (Golang preferred; Java, Kotlin, C++, Rust, or similar).
- A hands-on leadership style — comfortable reviewing code, debating architecture, and diving into production incidents alongside the team.
- Strong grasp of computer science fundamentals, data structures, and algorithms.
- Working knowledge of modern development methodologies (Scrum, Kanban) and a track record of delivering on committed milestones.
- Clear, transparent communication with both technical teams and non-technical stakeholders (Product, Project Management).
- Hands-on experience with our stack.
Nice to Have:
- Frontend development experience, understanding of web technologies and how creatives are served and rendered in the browser, and frontend device.
- Experience operating systems under global compliance and privacy frameworks.