Engineering Manager I

Role Overview

Engineering Manager I (Creative Team) at StackAdapt. You will lead backend engineers who own the creative pipeline—covering creative serving in bid requests, dynamic creative selection, and creative approval/audit workflows—while delivering reliably and supporting team growth.

Responsibilities

• Lead and support a team of backend engineers owning the creative pipeline; remove blockers and help the team ship reliably.
• Drive delivery against Product and senior engineering roadmap milestones by breaking work into well-scoped sprints, tracking progress, and escalating risks/delays early.
• Run Agile processes (stand-ups, planning, retros) and monitor sprint health (velocity, workload balance) to prevent burnout.
• People leadership: conduct regular 1:1s, provide tactical feedback, build psychological safety, mentor growth plans, and surface performance concerns early.
• Stay hands-on technically: participate in code reviews and architecture discussions; uphold coding/testing standards and guide scalable component-level design.
• Cross-team coordination with Bidding, Data Science, and Product on dependencies affecting creative serving/selection.
• Incident and on-call support: participate in incident resolution, ensure follow-through to root cause, support on-call rotation.
• Hiring and onboarding: participate in interviews with feedback; help onboard new team members.
• Improve velocity with tooling by encouraging adoption of approved AI tooling (code generation, debugging, documentation).
• Model company values (trust, transparency, technical excellence).

Requirements

• Adtech/martech + creative serving experience, including programmatic advertising and how creatives are served across channels.
• Experience with Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO) and ad markup/rendering.
• People management: 1+ year managing people, or 2+ years as a tech lead/mentor for a backend team, with desire to grow into a career manager.
• 5+ years backend development in distributed systems, microservices, and high-throughput, low-latency services.
• Proficiency in a backend language; Golang preferred (Java, Kotlin, C++, Rust, or similar acceptable).
• Hands-on leadership: comfortable code review, architecture debates, and joining production incident work.
• Strong CS fundamentals (data structures/algorithms).
• Working knowledge of Scrum and/or Kanban; track record of delivering committed milestones.
• Clear communication with technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Nice to Have

• Familiarity with the specific creative pipeline domain at scale (serving creatives on bid requests, selection workflows, approval/audit workflows).