Principal Software Engineer - Media Activation

OpenX is focused on unleashing the full economic potential of digital media companies. We do this by making digital advertising markets and technologies that are designed to deliver optimal value to publishers and advertisers on every ad served across all screens.

At OpenX, we have built a team that is uniquely experienced in designing and operating high-scale ad marketplaces, and we are constantly on the lookout for thoughtful, creative executors who are as fascinated as we are about finding new ways to apply a blend of market design, technical innovation, operational excellence, and empathetic partner service to the frontiers of digital advertising.

We’re seeking a Principal Engineer to lead the architecture, development, and technical direction of a 0–1 product within our platform. You’ll join a talented, remote-first US team and play a pivotal role in designing and coding the platform, mentoring senior engineers, and ensuring the architecture supports rapid iteration, massive scale, and long-term reliability.

An Ideal Candidate Is

• Open-minded – Welcomes feedback, learns from failure, and adapts quickly to change.
• Proactive – Takes initiative to identify problems and drive thoughtful, effective solutions.
• Self-motivated & Organized – Manages priorities independently and follows through with clarity and accountability.

What Your Team Does

Our team is responsible for delivering a new product within OpenX’s next-generation platform to help users activate their media more effectively. We focus on building scalable APIs and intuitive interfaces that give users access to our rapidly growing suite of AI-driven decisioning and optimization tools.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead architecture and development of a 0-1 product, ensuring scalability, fault tolerance, and high throughput.
• Design and deliver low-latency services and APIs for real-time media activation workloads.
• Drive critical platform features from design through implementation, testing, rollout, and adoption.
• Identify and address technical debt, performance bottlenecks, and scalability risks before they impact customers.
• Champion architectural patterns and platform capabilities that improve developer velocity and operational reliability.
• Promote engineering excellence through constructive code reviews, mentoring, and driving improvements in code quality, architecture, and platform best practices.

Required Qualifications

• 12+ years of professional software development experience, with expertise in Go or a comparable high-performance language (e.g. Java, Rust).
• Hands-on experience with a major cloud platform (GCP, AWS, or Azure) for designing and operating production workloads.
• Proven track record of delivering distributed, high-performance, and highly reliable backend systems that operate at scale.
• Expertise in API design and scaling (RESTful, gRPC, Thrift), including data modeling, error handling, performance optimization, and security best practices.
• Experience leading architecture and technical direction across multiple teams or product areas.
• Strong problem-solving skills, with the ability to anticipate and address scalability, reliability, and privacy challenges.
• Excellent collaboration and communication skills, with success working closely with product, engineering, and cross-functional stakeholders.
• Proven ability to mentor senior engineers and raise technical standards across an organization.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience designing real-time, low-latency, large-scale data processing systems.
• Knowledge of programmatic advertising or other high-throughput transactional platforms.
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code (Terraform, Helm), and advanced monitoring/observability tools (e.g. Grafana).
• Proven ability to introduce architectural patterns that improve developer velocity and system reliability.
• Experience using AI-assisted development tools to enhance productivity.

$229,500 - $238,000 a year