Engineering Manager I, Creatives

About the Team:

 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.