Staff Software Engineer-Advertising, Infrastructure and Services

Valassis (a Vericast company) is a leader in the marketing technology space, processing over 12 trillion calculations and analyzing more than 40 billion digital bid opportunities daily. The Marketing Science team is responsible for data analysis and measurement practices, allowing our clients to connect the dots between online and offline consumer behavior. They develop consumer insights with actionable implications, integrating research into all phases of communication planning process. This work is central to keeping Valassis at the forefront of our industry. 

Valassis is seeking a Staff Software Engineer I to help build the service layers and integration components of our digital advertising services. 

The Advertising Infrastructure and Services (AIS) engineering team builds and maintains the heart of our digital advertising business.  We are responsible for the services and infrastructure that configure, pace, and propagate our digital campaigns to our advertising execution systems.  We make pacing decisions that affect bidding in under 1 second via our real-time messaging system that can move messages in under 3 seconds to 3 remote data centers and over 500 servers.  Our services have over 50 internal clients which include batch jobs, other services, and ad-hoc queries.  In addition to supporting our Managed Services offerings, we also build API services that enable 3rd party entities to setup campaigns, register creatives, execute, retrieve performance/pacing reporting, and invoice.

We work in an Agile environment closely with Product Management and collaborate with other advertising engineering teams such as the Ad Optimization and Internal Tools/UI teams to deliver cross-team features that directly impact our business and revenue stream.  We deploy and monitor our production environment so we can see the fruits of our labor.  We take pride in maintaining a collaborative code base using pull-request reviews, coding standards, and automated testing to ensure reliability, readability, and maintainability. 

What you'll do:

• Design and deliver product features that enable our internal teams to configure, optimize, and execute on our digital advertising campaigns
• Build services that allow internal and external partners a way to integrate with our world-class demand-side platform
• Build backend services based off of Spring and Spring Boot that give engineering, data science and analytics teams access to our digital advertising campaign configuration
• Work with our UI, Optimization, and Data Science teams to adapt to the continually changing advertising landscape
• Troubleshoot and resolve business and production issues by determining what is happening, who is impacted, issue priority and resolution.

Who you are: 

• 5+ years of professional experience and extensive knowledge of application development using core Java, Spring framework, and Spring Boot.
• Strong proficiency in Java and comfortable in Python
• Proficient in SQL, familiarity with Postgres is a plus
• Curious self-starter and passionate about leaving code better than you found it
• Can design, build, deploy, and maintain services fundamental to our business with minimal guidance
• Great technical and business communication skills and can communicate effectively across multi-disciplinary teams
• Demonstrated ability to solve higher level problems
• Can assess technical trade-offs between solutions across service boundaries
• Experience with CI/CD tools such as Jenkins, BitBucket, GitLab

Our tech stack:

• Java
• Thrift/REST/OpenAPI
• Spring/Spring Boot
• PostgreSQL
• Python
• Ansible

3rd party tools:

• Git
• Jenkins
• Docker
• Kubernetes
• Rundeck

Vericast offers a generous total rewards benefits package that includes medical, dental and vision coverage, 401K matching and time off. A wide variety of additional benefits like life insurance, employee assistance and pet insurance are also available, not to mention smart and friendly coworkers! 

At Vericast, we don’t just accept differences - we celebrate them, we support them, and we thrive on them for the benefit of our employees, our clients, and our community. As an Equal Opportunity employer, Vericast considers applicants for all positions without regard to race, color, creed, religion, national origin or ancestry, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, disability, genetic information, veteran status, or any other classifications protected by law. Applicants who have disabilities may request that accommodations be made in order to complete the selection process by contacting our Talent Acquisition team at [email protected] or 616-541-3145.  

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