Senior Software Engineer

The Activation team is the engineering arm of WPP Open Intelligence. We build the foundational data infrastructure and high-performance edge services that support WPP’s activation capabilities.

Approximately one-third of global media spend flows through WPP, and our platform is deeply integrated with major supply-side partners across the AdTech industry. At our current scale, our edge services handle more than 60,000 classification requests per second, while our contextual classification pipelines process approximately 10,000 requests per second.

With operations across the US and UK and planned expansion across EMEA and APAC, our infrastructure operates at significant global scale. We are an engineering-led team focused on building robust, scalable, highly reliable systems.

We are expanding our engineering team to support the next stage of growth and a new catalog of privacy-preserving data products. These products are designed to scale advanced targeting capabilities while protecting user privacy.

Our infrastructure is expanding globally, and we are deepening integrations with leading supply-side partners in the AdTech industry. We are looking for engineers who can help us design for the next order of magnitude while keeping our systems resilient, performant, observable, and compliant.

As a Senior Software Engineer, you will own reliable backend services and API integrations in production. You will help drive solutions from design through delivery, raising the quality of both the systems we build and the way we operate them.

You will work across partner API clients, internal APIs, workflow steps, orchestration components, and the interfaces between Open Intelligence and activation systems. We value strong software engineering fundamentals—including clean design, testable code, and sound operational practices—over allegiance to any particular framework.

• →Design, develop, and review backend services and API integrations to a high engineering standard.
• →Own and evolve orchestration and gateway components, including workflow steps, partner API clients, internal service APIs, and activation interfaces.
• →Partner with Product, lead engineers, and teams across audience, data, and performance to turn requirements into durable production services.
• →Build robust integrations with authentication, rate limiting, idempotency, retries, partial-update patterns, versioning, clear error handling, and operational runbooks.
• →Establish and maintain production standards for CI/CD, unit and integration testing, API contract testing, observability, auditability, and safe releases.
• →Maintain an end-to-end view of the activation flows you support, identifying dependencies, incidents, and technical debt and proposing sequenced improvements.
• →Contribute hands-on to critical foundations such as gateways, tool registries, workflow runtimes, and guardrails hooks; mentor colleagues through design reviews, code reviews, and pairing.

You will collaborate closely with Product, lead engineers, and sibling teams across audience, data, and performance. You will contribute to an engineering-led environment where teams communicate trade-offs clearly, share ownership of end-to-end flows, and work together to improve reliability over time.

• Substantial software engineering experience - 5+ years or equivalent depth of production ownership—in backend, platform, or API-focused roles.
• A track record of delivering and operating backend services, integrations, or platforms in production at meaningful scale.
• Strong proficiency in at least one backend language, such as Python, Go, or Java/Kotlin; Python is preferred.
• Experience designing and operating REST/HTTP APIs and event- or workflow-driven systems, such as asynchronous jobs, queues, durable state, or orchestration.
• Experience owning third-party and internal integrations, including authentication, error handling, versioning, monitoring, and partner-driven change.
• Experience with Git, CI/CD, and testing practices including unit, integration, and boundary or contract testing where APIs are involved.
• Experience with cloud platforms, containers, Kubernetes, infrastructure as code such as Terraform, and production observability through metrics, logs, or tracing.

• You communicate technical trade-offs clearly with engineers, Product, and partner teams.
• You surface blockers early and present practical options.
• You take ownership of incidents, postmortems, technical debt, and systemic improvements—not only feature delivery.
• You are comfortable mentoring engineers through reviews, design feedback, and clear ownership boundaries.

• Experience delivering orchestration, workflow, or agentic systems, including tool registries, policy or guardrail mechanisms, or human-in-the-loop flows.
• Familiarity with AdTech or MarTech concepts such as SSPs, DSPs, deals, audiences, or campaign activation.
• Full-stack exposure through internal user interfaces or operational tools backed by the APIs you build.
• Experience working in a monorepo or large shared codebase with many integration surfaces.
• Awareness of data privacy and the safe handling of sensitive data in distributed systems, including audit trails or decision logs.
• Experience mentoring engineers or leading technical design for a multi-person initiative without formal people management.
• Interest in using AI coding assistants and prompt engineering responsibly to improve productivity without compromising quality.

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