Senior Chief Technology Officer (CTO) - Scalable Systems & Search

Hands-On, Scalable Systems & Search

Location: Remote (US-based) – working closely with US & India engineering teams

Reports To: CEO

Advertising.com is looking for a very senior, hands-on Chief Technology Officer (CTO) who is equally comfortable defining technology strategy and writing production-grade code.

This person will roll up their sleeves to debug issues, stabilize existing systems, and design new platforms that make our business scalable, stable, and resilient. The CTO will remove technical bottlenecks, lead distributed dev teams in the US and India, and be client-facing with key enterprise partners.

Responsibilities:

1. Technical Leadership & Architecture

• Own the end-to-end technology vision, architecture, and roadmap across all products and platforms.
• Design and evolve a scalable, low-latency, fault-tolerant architecture capable of supporting high-volume ad, search, and data workloads.
• Champion best practices in software design, code quality, security, observability, and performance.
• Evaluate and introduce technologies, tools, and frameworks that improve throughput, reliability, and developer productivity.

2. Hands-On Engineering

• Act as a player-coach: write and review code for critical services and features.
• Jump into production incidents, troubleshoot issues, and guide teams toward root-cause fixes.
• Refactor and modernize legacy systems without disrupting revenue and SLAs.
• Lead by example in coding standards, testing discipline, and documentation.

3. Search, Data, and OpenSearch Ownership

• Own the design and optimization of our search, indexing, and analytics layers, with a particular focus on OpenSearch (or Elasticsearch-compatible stacks).
• Architect and maintain clusters, indexing strategies, and query patterns that support large-scale search and reporting, real-time analytics, and low-latency workloads.
• Ensure search and data systems are secure, observable, and cost-efficient.

4. Platform Reliability, SLAs & Production Excellence

• Take ultimate responsibility for uptime, performance, and stability across all customer-facing and internal systems.
• Define and enforce standards for monitoring, alerting, and incident response, as well as error budgets and SLOs aligned to advertiser and partner SLAs.
• Drive post-incident reviews and continuous improvement to reduce recurrence and impact of issues.
• Identify and remove technical bottlenecks that delay launches, limit scale, or create recurring production issues.

5. Global Team Leadership (US & India)

• Lead and mentor distributed engineering teams across the US and India.
• Establish clear priorities, ownership, and communication rhythms that enable follow-the-sun development and support.
• Build a culture of accountability, transparency, and collaboration, empowering senior engineers while keeping everyone aligned to business goals.
• Partner with HR and leadership to define org structure and hiring plans, recruit senior talent, and manage performance and growth.

6. Client-Facing & Cross-Functional Partner

• Serve as the senior technical voice with enterprise clients and partners, joining key meetings to explain architecture, integrations, and data flows.
• Address technical concerns, performance questions, and SLAs in clear, business-friendly language.
• Co-design solutions that meet complex client requirements while protecting platform stability and scalability.
• Work closely with Product, Business Development, Account Management, and Operations to translate client and market needs into a clear technical roadmap.

7. Strategy, Governance & Compliance

• Align technology strategy with company P&L, growth targets, and partnership commitments.
• Ensure systems and processes comply with relevant security, privacy, and regulatory requirements (e.g., SOC2-style controls, data protection, auditability).
• Champion continuous improvement for SDLC, QA, CI/CD, and release management to reduce defects and deployment risk.

Requirements & Qualifications:

• Experience – 10–15+ years in software engineering or technology roles, including 5+ years in a senior leadership position (CTO, VP Engineering, Head of Engineering, or equivalent).
• Proven success leading high-scale, distributed systems in AdTech, MarTech, e-commerce, data platforms, or similarly demanding environments.
• Demonstrated track record as a hands-on technical leader who still codes and can deep-dive into architecture and production issues.
• Significant experience leading distributed teams across multiple geographies, including India.
• Direct experience in AdTech / programmatic advertising / real-time bidding.
• Experience with tracking, attribution, pixels, and high-volume click/event pipelines.
• Familiarity with security, privacy, and compliance frameworks (e.g., SOC2) and working with enterprise InfoSec and legal teams.

Technical Skills

• Expert-level understanding of OpenSearch and broader search/data stack concepts, including index design, query optimization, and cluster management.
• Experience scaling search infrastructure for large data volumes and high QPS while tuning for performance, cost, and reliability.
• Versed in multiple programming languages (for example: Java, Node.js, Go, Python, PHP, etc.) and comfortable moving across stacks while PHP and Node.js is must
• Strong background in distributed systems and microservices, RESTful APIs, event-driven architectures, relational and NoSQL databases, and messaging/queue systems.
• Cloud infrastructure experience (AWS, GCP, or Azure), including containers and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Familiarity with technologies such as PHP, Java, Node.js, Solr, modern JS frameworks, AWS, GitHub, and CI/CD pipelines.

Leadership & Soft Skills

• “Roll up your sleeves” mentality: willing to dig into code, logs, and architecture diagrams personally when needed.
• Excellent communication skills, able to translate complex technical topics into clear business language for executives and clients.
• Strong people leadership: mentoring senior engineers, building high-performing teams, and navigating tough decisions.
• Ability to balance short-term firefighting with long-term architectural investment.
• High degree of ownership, integrity, and bias toward action.

Education

• Bachelor’s or master’s degree in computer science, Computer Engineering, & equivalent practical experience.

What We Offer

• Competitive compensation and performance-based incentives.
• Medical insurance and retirement/401(k) benefits.
• Generous PTO and company holidays.
• Remote-friendly culture with strong work/life balance initiatives.
• Training, certifications, and opportunities to grow with a high-impact, fast-moving organization.