S

Smartly.io

Automates social ads across platforms

Senior Software Engineer - Authorisation

Full-TimeUpdated on 10/15/2026
No salary listed
Senior
Helsinki, Finland
HybridAt least three days per week in the Helsinki office; work abroad is permitted for up to 30 days.
Software EngineeringBackend Engineering

About the job

Requirements
  • At least 5 years of experience designing, architecting and building robust, complex and distributed web applications, with system-level design as a core responsibility.
  • Strong experience designing and implementing authorisation, access-control or permission systems in production.
  • A clear understanding of RBAC and permission modelling; policy-based access control; fine-grained or resource-level permissions; multi-tenant access control; service-to-service authorisation; delegation and impersonation; and policy evaluation, enforcement and auditing.
  • Strong backend development skills with NodeJS and TypeScript.
  • Professional experience selecting, documenting and applying architectural and design patterns.
  • Experience building APIs and distributed services that need to be secure, scalable, highly available and maintainable.
  • Good understanding of data modelling and persistence technologies such as Postgres, as well as event-driven systems such as Kafka.
  • Experience working with containerised services and cloud-native infrastructure, particularly Docker and Kubernetes.
  • Ability to reason about complex systems and translate ambiguous business requirements into clear technical solutions.
  • Strong written and verbal communication skills in English.
  • Ability to work hybridly, spending at least 3 days a week in the Helsinki office.
Responsibilities
  • Architect, design and document scalable authorisation systems for complex, distributed and multi-tenant environments.
  • Design permission models, access-control policies and evaluation flows that can be applied consistently across Smartly’s platform.
  • Build and maintain services responsible for making and enforcing access decisions across multiple products and modules.
  • Translate architectural designs into maintainable, robust and high-quality code, primarily using NodeJS and TypeScript.
  • Develop APIs and service integrations that enable other backend services and frontend applications to consume authorisation capabilities.
  • Consider consistency, performance, availability, security and auditability when designing authorisation systems.
  • Establish patterns and best practices for integrating access checks into services across the wider platform.
  • Improve the observability, testing and operational reliability of authorisation decisions.
  • Collaborate with Product, Infrastructure, Security, Engineering and Support teams to translate business and customer requirements into viable access-control solutions.
  • Mentor other engineers and contribute to engineering standards, technical design reviews and ways of working.
  • Help shape the future architecture of Smartly’s authorisation platform.

About the company

Smartly.io automates social media advertising for brands by handling media buying, creative production, and performance optimization across platforms like Facebook and Instagram. It combines software that automates campaign tasks with a managed services team that provides expert guidance to help brands scale efficiently and profitably. Its Creative Services unit designs, produces, and continually tests ad creatives to improve engagement and return on ad spend (ROAS). The goal is to help brands adapt to changing social media behavior and achieve scalable, profitable advertising across multiple platforms.

Company Size

1,001-5,000

Company Stage

Acquired

Total Funding

$2.8M

Headquarters

Helsinki, Finland

Founded

2013

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Simplify's Take

What believers are saying

  • Smartly's September 2026 ADVANCE drew 750 leaders, signaling strong enterprise attention and pipeline.
  • INCRMNTAL adds causal measurement, improving ROI proof for brands spending across fragmented channels.
  • LinkedIn and Roku expansions open new budget pools in B2B video and CTV in 2026.

What critics are saying

  • Meta, Google, TikTok, and LinkedIn can copy Smartly's automation and compress margins quickly.
  • Smartly depends on platform partnerships; any API change from Reddit or Roku breaks workflows.
  • If enterprise buyers adopt native AI tools, Smartly becomes a thinner services wrapper by 2027.

What makes Smartly.io unique

  • Smartly unifies creative, media, and incrementality after acquiring INCRMNTAL on May 7, 2026.
  • LinkedIn integration and Reddit Max API access make Smartly a cross-platform execution layer.
  • Roku CTV integration extends social creative workflows onto television through Roku Ads API.

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Benefits

Unlimited Paid Time Off

Paid Holidays

Paid Sick Leave

Health Insurance

Mental Health Support

401(k) Retirement Plan

401(k) Company Match

Company Equity

Life Insurance

Disability Insurance

Growth & Insights and Company News

Headcount

6 month growth

0%

1 year growth

0%

2 year growth

0%
IT Brief US
Oct 8th, 2026
Smartly names ex-Netflix executive Kelly Uphoff CTO.

Smartly names ex-Netflix executive Kelly Uphoff CTO. Thu, 8th Oct 2026 (Today) Smartly has appointed Kelly Uphoff as Chief Technology Officer, bringing in a former senior technology executive from Tala and Netflix. Uphoff will lead the company's global engineering organisation and oversee work on its AI-focused advertising platform. Her remit includes systems designed to learn from campaign signals across creative, media, measurement and optimisation. The appointment marks a senior leadership change at the advertising technology group as it puts greater emphasis on automated decision-making in marketing. The role will focus on developing technology that uses campaign data to inform subsequent creative and media choices. Uphoff joins from Tala, where she served as Chief Technology Officer and led technology for the financial platform. Before that, she spent a decade at Netflix, leading data science and engineering teams working across machine learning, predictive modelling and experimentation. Her background in personalisation and AI informed the hire as advertisers shift from using AI to generate assets to applying it across a broader set of campaign decisions, including how campaigns are created, activated, measured and adjusted. Leadership change Uphoff succeeds Lauri Tarkkala as Chief Technology Officer. During his tenure, Tarkkala oversaw a reworking of Smartly's technology foundation and the development of its unified platform. That period also included the integration of acquisitions such as Ad-Lib.io, Viralspace.ai and INCRMNTAL, which expanded the company's work in creative and campaign decisioning. Laura Desmond, Chief Executive Officer at Smartly, linked the appointment to wider changes in the development of advertising technology. "Advertising is entering a fundamentally new era, where AI and intelligent systems will reshape how brands understand and respond to consumers, make decisions and turn intelligence into action," said Laura Desmond, Chief Executive Officer at Smartly. Desmond also outlined the company's view of the role AI will play in its products and engineering priorities. "Kelly understands that in an AI-native system, every signal is an opportunity to learn and make the next decision better. She brings the technical depth, AI expertise and customer orientation to help us accelerate the continuous optimization loops across creative and media, where every action generates intelligence that improves what comes next. That is how we create better experiences for people and better outcomes for marketers," Desmond said. Smartly's latest executive hire comes as advertising groups across the sector try to apply AI to more than content production. Many are seeking tools that can combine data analysis, experimentation and automation to decide which audiences to target, which creative treatments to use and how budgets should shift during a campaign. In that context, technical leadership has become more central to product strategy. Companies in the adtech market are under pressure to show that AI can improve measurable campaign performance while fitting into the systems brands and agencies already use. For Smartly, that means continuing to build around a platform model that unifies campaign functions rather than treating media buying, creative development and measurement as separate tasks. Its engineering work is increasingly focused on continuous decision intelligence across the campaign lifecycle. Uphoff said that trend shaped her decision to join the business. "The next chapter of advertising will require technology that can continuously learn, make better decisions and translate intelligence into experiences that are genuinely relevant to each consumer," said Kelly Uphoff, incoming Chief Technology Officer at Smartly. She also pointed to Smartly's existing technical base and the scope for further development. "Smartly has built a strong technology foundation and has a compelling opportunity to bring AI, data and decision-making together in ways that create meaningful value for marketers. I'm excited to join the team and help build what comes next to move advertising forward," Uphoff said.

Adweek
Sep 29th, 2026
Horizon's bob Lord takes aim at holdcos' FTE pricing models: 'it's the old system'

Horizon's bob Lord takes aim at holdcos' FTE pricing models: 'it's the old system' The executive expects brands will stop paying for agencies' traditional headcount-based models within the next five years. 4 hours ago ADWEEK House: Advertising HQ brings the people shaping advertising, commerce, and media together for four days of unscripted conversations and after-hours connections. Meet Meettool in Midtown, Oct. 5-8. Bob Lord, president of independent agency Horizon Media Holdings, is condemning some agencies' labor-based pricing models. "You have to create composable architectures" to drive clients' business growth, he said onstage at Smartly's Advance event in Lower Manhattan. "What's holding Meettool back? Inertia. "It's the old system: FTE [full-time equivalent]-based models, principal-based buying - how the holdcos make their money," he added. "You've made investments in technology over the last five years. You need to monetize that investment, and you're going to force it on your clients." He said he was "not picking on anyone," but simply highlighting "an economic equation." Later in the same panel discussion, he predicted that within five years, clients would stop paying for the FTE model. Kendra Barnett is Adweek's senior tech reporter. Recommended videos

MarTech Cube
Sep 23rd, 2026
Smartly partners with LinkedIn to scale creative and video for B2B.

Smartly partners with LinkedIn to scale creative and video for B2B. Search. LinkedIn's professional audience insights combined with Smartly's AI-powered creative and performance intelligence give marketers the speed and intelligence to deliver more relevant creative across every stage of the B2B buying journey. Smartly, the AI-powered advertising technology company transforming ad experiences for brands and their consumers, today announced a new integration bringing LinkedIn Ads into its unified advertising platform, expanding the channels marketers can manage with Smartly. The integration will help marketers personalize creative for professional audiences, accelerate video production and use audience and performance intelligence to continuously improve advertising outcomes. "Our collaboration with LinkedIn extends Smartly's creative and intelligence capabilities to one of the most important environments for B2B marketers," said Laura Desmond, CEO, Smartly. "When you're engaging a complex buying group, one message or one piece of creative isn't enough. Smartly makes it possible to turn audience intelligence into relevant creative at scale, learn from performance, and continuously make the next ad better. Smartly's integration with LinkedIn brings that advantage to B2B marketers." The integration brings Smartly's creative and performance capabilities to LinkedIn at a time when B2B marketers are navigating increasingly complex buying journeys. Purchase decisions often involve multiple stakeholders with different priorities, raising the need for creative that speaks to distinct audiences, buying stages and markets. By combining LinkedIn's professional audience with Smartly's creative automation and intelligence, marketers can turn a deeper understanding of who they are reaching into more relevant advertising and continuously improve what performs. For B2B marketers, this brings Smartly's AI-powered creative and campaign intelligence capabilities to LinkedIn, helping teams: * Make B2B creative more intelligent: Combine audience insights from LinkedIn's professional network with Smartly's creative intelligence to create and deliver more relevant creative across the buying journey. * Scale video for LinkedIn: Use AI-powered automation to produce, version and iterate video at scale, turning existing creative into more relevant video assets for LinkedIn faster. * Turn performance signals into action: Bring campaign and creative insights into a continuous intelligence loop that uses AI to surface what's working, identify opportunities to optimize and inform smarter creative and campaign decisions on LinkedIn.

We are Social Media
Sep 5th, 2026
Reddit opens its ai-powered Max campaigns to every advertiser.

Reddit opens its ai-powered Max campaigns to every advertiser. Reddit is asking advertisers to make a familiar bargain: bring the objective, budget and creative, then let the platform decide how to turn them into results. The company has made Reddit Max campaigns available to every advertiser, taking its most automated campaign type out of limited availability. Discover more Launch Ad Campaigns advertising Hire Social Agencies Max uses artificial intelligence to manage targeting, creative selection, placements, bidding and budget allocation. Reddit says early testing produced a 17% lower cost per acquisition and more than 27% additional conversions compared with advertisers' standard campaigns. But the expansion is about more than giving additional advertisers access. Reddit is also adding asset groups, support through its advertising API and an integration with Smartly. Together, those additions turn Max from a simplified campaign option into something agencies and larger advertisers can realistically manage at scale. What changed since Reddit Max entered beta. When WeRSM first covered Reddit Max, the product was positioned as a faster way to build traffic and conversion campaigns. Advertisers could provide multiple headlines, images and calls to action, then allow Reddit's system to determine which combination should appear for each impression. That basic proposition remains unchanged. What has changed is the campaign infrastructure surrounding it. Advertisers can now create and manage Max campaigns through Reddit's advertising API. Smartly has become the first third-party platform to support the format, allowing its customers to build and scale campaigns without relying exclusively on Reddit Ads Manager. Reddit is also introducing asset groups. These allow advertisers to organize several creative sets inside a single Max campaign. A retailer could create one asset group for footwear and another for accessories. Each group can have its own headlines, media, destination URL and reporting while sharing the same wider campaign structure. That makes Max considerably more useful for brands managing multiple product lines, offers or customer needs. What advertisers still control. A Max campaign does not ask advertisers to surrender every decision. The advertiser still chooses the campaign objective, destination URL, budget, schedule and bid strategy. Location, device targeting, custom audience exclusions and brand-safety settings can also remain firm restrictions. Advertisers then provide the system with a selection of headlines, images, videos and calls to action. Reddit Max decides which assets to combine, where to place the resulting ad, which audiences should receive it and how the available budget should be distributed. Reddit can also suggest headlines using language associated with conversations on the platform, generate thumbnails and crop creative for different placements. The system is therefore automating execution, but it still depends on the advertiser to define the commercial goal, supply the raw creative material and establish the boundaries it must respect. The most important tradeoff appears inside audience targeting. Advertisers can suggest communities, keywords, interests, demographics and custom audiences. However, these inputs guide the system rather than strictly limiting where the campaign can run. If an advertiser identifies several running communities, Reddit Max can use that information as a starting signal. It can also move beyond those communities if its models predict that another audience is more likely to produce the desired result. That flexibility is designed to unlock conversions advertisers might otherwise miss. It also means marketers lose some of the certainty that comes from selecting exactly where their advertising should appear. Location, audience exclusions and brand-safety restrictions can still act as hard boundaries. Community and keyword selections generally cannot. For performance marketers, that may be an acceptable exchange. For advertisers whose strategy depends on reaching a specific cultural context, the distinction deserves close attention. Reddit is trying to open the black box. Reddit is positioning reporting as one of the defining differences between Max and other automated campaign products. Its Top Audience Personas reporting can show the types of people who responded to a campaign, alongside their interests and relevant communities. Advertisers can also inspect performance by placement, device and location. Asset reporting reveals which individual elements and creative combinations delivered results. That matters because automated campaigns often leave marketers knowing that something worked without clearly explaining who responded or which creative decision made the difference. Reddit's approach can potentially turn campaign delivery into audience research. A brand may discover an unexpected community, persona or creative combination that can inform its next campaign. This does not make Max completely transparent. Advertisers are still relying on Reddit's models to determine delivery, and visibility after a campaign is not the same as control before it. But useful post-campaign insight is better than a single performance score with no explanation attached. Reddit's performance claims need context. Reddit says Max campaigns produced a 17% lower cost per acquisition and more than 27% additional conversions during testing. Those numbers are encouraging, but the footnote matters. The results are based on 17 split tests conducted between June and August 2025. Each test compared Max with a standard campaign over 21 days. That is a more credible comparison than collecting unrelated advertiser success stories, but it is still a relatively small group of tests managed and reported by Reddit. The company does not disclose the full range of industries, budgets or results behind the average. Advertisers should therefore treat the figures as a reason to test Max, not as a guaranteed benchmark. The relevant question is not whether Reddit's average advertiser improved. It is whether Max can outperform a brand's existing campaign structure while maintaining conversion quality, revenue and customer value. How marketers should test Reddit Max. The best way to approach Max is as a controlled performance experiment. Marketers should: * Connect the Reddit Pixel and Conversions API before increasing spend. The system needs reliable conversion signals to learn what a valuable result looks like. * Provide genuinely different creative options. Fifteen minor headline variations will give the system less to learn from than several distinct messages, formats and value propositions. * Use asset groups to separate product lines, offers or use cases that lead to different landing pages. * Establish location, audience exclusions and brand-safety controls before launch. * Compare Max with a standard campaign using similar creative, offers, attribution settings and campaign periods. * Measure qualified conversions, revenue and customer value alongside clicks, conversion volume and cost per acquisition. * Review the communities and audience personas discovered by the system. These insights may be as useful as the immediate performance result. Reddit's recently expanded split-testing tools give marketers a particularly relevant way to compare Max against their existing approach without relying on impressions or instinct. Every advertising platform is selling the machine. Reddit Max arrives as automation becomes standard across digital advertising. The major platforms increasingly want advertisers to supply a goal, a collection of creative assets and a budget, then trust their systems to handle the rest. As those products begin to resemble one another, the competitive question becomes less about who offers automation and more about what proprietary signals inform it. Reddit's answer is Community Intelligence: the interests, language, questions and purchasing conversations taking place across its communities. That context could give Max a meaningful advantage. Someone discussing the best running shoes for flat feet is expressing a different kind of intent from someone who merely watched a fitness video. But community intelligence cannot rescue generic creative. If Max expands a campaign beyond the audiences originally suggested, the advertisement still needs to make sense to the person receiving it. Automation increases the importance of strong positioning and adaptable creative because advertisers have less certainty about the exact context in which each impression will appear. Reddit Max may reduce the number of campaign decisions marketers need to make manually. It does not eliminate the need to understand how Reddit behaves. The system can identify where an advertiser might find results. The brand still has to give those communities a reason to care.

Martech Edge
Sep 3rd, 2026
Smartly's ADVANCE to Explore AI's Impact on Advertising.

Smartly's ADVANCE to Explore AI's Impact on Advertising. Published on: Sep 3, 2026 Smartly is bringing its ADVANCE industry event back to New York City on September 29, with music producer Timbaland set to join Smartly CEO Laura Desmond for a mainstage discussion on creativity, originality and artificial intelligence in advertising. The event at Spring Studios is expected to bring together more than 750 senior leaders from brands, agencies and technology platforms, according to Smartly. The agenda spans creative AI, commerce AI, media, agency transformation and the convergence of performance and brand marketing. Timbaland's participation puts the creative implications of generative AI at the center of the event. His discussion with Desmond is expected to examine how marketers can preserve distinctive creative perspectives as AI makes content production and experimentation more accessible. The broader agenda reflects a significant shift underway across advertising technology. Smartly's platform combines creative production, media management and intelligence, positioning AI as an orchestration layer across campaign workflows rather than simply a tool for generating advertising assets. Speakers listed for ADVANCE include executives from Accenture Song, DoorDash, Google, Horizon Media, Meta, Pinterest, Reddit, Snapchat, TikTok, The New York Times, WPP, Wpromote and YouTube. Their participation highlights how AI-driven advertising is becoming a cross-platform issue involving creative development, media buying, commerce and consumer discovery. The timing also aligns with broader industry investment in AI. The Interactive Advertising Bureau's 2026 outlook forecasts U.S. advertising spending to grow 9.5% year over year, while five of the six top buyer priorities identified in its research are centered on AI. Two-thirds of surveyed buyers are specifically focused on agentic AI for advertising buying and campaign execution. That transition creates a more complicated challenge for marketers. Greater automation can accelerate production and optimization, but it also raises questions about creative differentiation, brand consistency, measurement and consumer trust. IAB research published in January found that 82% of advertising executives believed Gen Z and millennial consumers feel positive about AI-generated advertising, compared with 45% of consumers who actually reported positive sentiment. The gap suggests that increasing AI adoption does not necessarily translate into greater consumer acceptance. ADVANCE's emphasis on human creativity alongside AI therefore reflects a broader industry debate: whether advertising organizations should use AI primarily to increase production efficiency or as a way to redesign how creative, media and commerce decisions are made. Market landscape. AI is moving from experimentation toward operational infrastructure across advertising. IAB's 2026 research shows buyers increasingly prioritizing agentic AI, cross-platform measurement and performance optimization. At the same time, the industry's growing dependence on automated creative systems introduces new challenges around quality and authenticity. IAB has developed an AI transparency and disclosure framework as marketers increasingly use generative AI in advertising production. Strategic outlook. Smartly's ADVANCE reflects the convergence of creative technology, advertising media and commerce infrastructure. The event's agenda suggests that the next phase of AI adoption will focus less on isolated content-generation tools and more on integrated systems capable of connecting creative decisions with media performance. For agencies and brands, the strategic question will be how to scale AI-enabled production without making advertising less distinctive. Human judgment, brand voice and measurement are likely to remain important differentiators as automated campaign execution expands. Top insights. * Smartly's ADVANCE takes place September 29 at Spring Studios in New York City. * Timbaland will discuss creativity and originality in the AI era with Smartly CEO Laura Desmond. * More than 750 industry leaders are expected, according to Smartly. * IAB forecasts 9.5% U.S. ad-spend growth in 2026. * Two-thirds of surveyed buyers are focused on agentic AI for ad buying and campaign execution. * Consumer attitudes toward AI-generated advertising remain less positive than advertiser expectations.