Staff Backend Engineer

About The Role

The Ads Delivery team at AdRise builds the systems that turn advertiser budgets into effective, well‑paced ad outcomes. As a Staff Backend Engineer, you will design and operate distributed backend services that determine when, where, and how ads are delivered across partner applications.

You will work closely with Machine Learning, Data Science, and Ad Serving teams to implement and evolve algorithms for pacing, planning, and optimization, while continuously improving the scalability, reliability, and efficiency of our ad delivery platform. This is a highly impactful role with broad technical ownership and influence across the Ads ecosystem.

Snapshot of Your Responsibilities

• Architect, design, and evolve large‑scale, high‑throughput, low‑latency distributed systems that power ad delivery and pacing, primarily using Scala
• Set technical direction for critical Ad Delivery services, balancing long‑term scalability with immediate business needs
• Lead API and service development with a strong focus on correctness, observability, and operational excellence
• Drive cross‑functional initiatives with ML, Data Science, and Ad Serving teams to improve pacing, planning, and optimization systems
• Identify architectural bottlenecks and lead efforts to simplify, modernize, and scale systems as demand grows
• Raise engineering standards through design reviews, code reviews, and mentorship of senior and mid‑level engineers
• Prototype and validate new approaches, bringing successful innovations into production at scale
• Own production health by driving incident prevention, monitoring, and continuous improvement across the Ads Delivery stack

What You Will Need

• Extensive experience designing and building scalable distributed systems using JVM languages (Scala preferred; Java or Kotlin acceptable)
• Deep expertise with relational databases (e.g., Postgres), caching systems (e.g., Redis), and messaging/streaming platforms (e.g., Kafka or Kinesis)
• Strong hands‑on experience with Akka technologies, including clustering and distributed coordination in production
• Proven ability to build and operate near real‑time, high‑performance, fault‑tolerant services
• Experience working with big data or streaming frameworks such as Apache Spark or Flink
• Demonstrated technical leadership, including driving architecture decisions and influencing cross‑team systems
• Strong ownership mindset with a pragmatic approach to delivering high‑quality, scalable solutions

NICE TO HAVE, BUT NOT A DEALBREAKER

• Experience operating large‑scale distributed systems using Kubernetes, Terraform, and related infrastructure tooling
• Experience in ad tech, including ad serving, targeting, delivery, or measurement systems

Pursuant to local pay disclosure requirements, the pay range for this role, with final offer amount dependent on education, skills, experience, and location is as listed annually below. This role is also eligible for an annual discretionary bonus, long‑term incentive plan, and various benefits including medical/dental/vision, insurance, vacation/paid time off and other benefits in accordance with applicable plan documents. Toronto, Canada $250,000.00 - $300,000.00

Equal Opportunity Employment

We are an equal opportunity employer and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, gender identity, disability, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. We will consider for employment qualified applicants with criminal histories consistent with applicable law.