Project specification
Project expertise
Description
As an Engineering Manager, you enable your team to do their best work: approachable, a good listener, and a strong facilitator of ideas and knowledge. You bring your own ideas for improving the architecture and extending what our systems can do.
This is a hands-on leadership role. We want a manager who is also a strong engineer, someone who acts as technical lead, dives into the code and architecture when it matters, and sets direction by example.
THE ADS BACKEND TEAM
The team owns In-house Server-Side Ad Insertion (SSAI) solution: the whole ad pipeline, from deciding which ads to show to tracking every impression, built as a suite of services serving viewers at scale. These are business-critical services with a direct revenue impact, and we collaborate closely with our sister teams (Ingest & Storage, Streaming & CDN, Playback) and commercial and ad operations stakeholders.
We’re about to take SSAI to the next level: a major re-architecture. It’s the team’s flagship challenge ahead, and one we want this hire to help lead from the front.
WHAT YOU’LL DO
- Lead the Ads Backend team, organizationally and technically
- Own the technical vision and architecture of our SSAI platform, with the senior developers
- Contribute hands-on as technical lead: review designs, raise the bar by example, and step into critical code when needed
- Own the end-to-end development process and operational excellence for revenue-impacting services
- Help shape the technical direction of Zattoo’s broader video platform, with the other video teams and our Principal Engineers
- Drive cross-team initiatives spanning across multiple video teams.
- Represent the team to stakeholders.
- Directly manage 2 – 4 engineers and lead hiring
- Grow, develop, and retain engineering talent
Requirements
- 5+ years leading engineering teams
- Strong, current hands-on engineering: you can design, build, and review production code and act as technical lead
- Proficient in C++/Go
- Experience building highly available services and APIs that scale
- Experience with distributed systems, event-driven architectures and message queues (e.g. Kafka), and non-relational databases (e.g. Scylla)
- Testing is a fundamental part of how you build software
- Experience with advertising technology platforms, ad serving, and dynamic ad insertion (DAI/SSAI)
- Broad experience across the video pipeline (ingest, transcoding, packaging, DRM, streaming, playback)
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Frequently asked questions
The project is based in Berlin, Germany.
The project preferably starts in September 2026 and is planned to end in March 2027 (6 months).
The project requires a commitment of 90 - 100% capacity (full-time).
The project offers 40 - 50% remote work.
The project requires the following languages: German (Advanced) and English (Advanced).
The project is related to the following industry: Media and Entertainment.
The project covers the following business areas: Information Technology and Product Development.
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To apply for the project, click the Apply button on the project page to submit your profile for review. We will forward your resume to the client and get back to you within a few days.
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