Programmatic Infrastructure Lead

About Publicit

Be everywhere. Publicit is the European self-service platform for omnichannel advertising: one dashboard that puts a campaign on connected TV, billboards, digital screens in the street, metro stations, mobile apps and press. Things that used to take three agencies and six weeks now take a few minutes and a work email.

Underneath that simple dashboard sits the hard part, our own hybrid ad exchange. Every time an ad slot opens anywhere in our network, a TV in a living room or a screen in a metro corridor, an auction has to run and finish before anyone notices it happened. Milliseconds. Not "fast for a web app" milliseconds; the kind where every unnecessary operation is the difference between winning and losing.

Most of the industry solved this by stacking more cloud servers on the problem and accepting the latency. We took the opposite bet: rebuild the decision path from the ground up with hardware acceleration and real-time decisioning, so we can afford to actually think about each auction. Is this ad relevant to this viewer? Is this placement safe for this brand? What is it genuinely worth? All of it in the time most exchanges spend on network overhead alone.

We're a small engineering team in Barcelona building real infrastructure in a market where most players stopped building years ago. Nobody here is maintaining someone else's platform.

The role

This is the role that connects Publicit to the rest of the advertising ecosystem. Every impression we serve starts with a partnership we built and a protocol we integrated. You own that surface.

The programmatic supply chain is not one pipe. It's dozens of pipes, each with its own dialect, its own interpretation of the specs, its own idea of what a "deal" means, and its own timeline for getting anything done. Someone has to hold all of that in their head, turn it into clean integrations that work at auction speed, and decide which partnerships are worth the engineering time in the first place. That person is you.

You'll be the one on the call with an SSP's technical team, and the one writing the code that makes the handshake work. You'll negotiate how a supply partner sends us bid requests and then make sure we respond in the time they allow. When a new publisher comes online and impressions don't match, you're the one who figures out why.

This is a senior role on a young team. We don't need someone who manages from a spreadsheet. We need someone who's been deep inside the programmatic stack, knows where the bodies are buried, and can build the integrations that let a small team punch above its weight. You'll set the playbook for how we onboard every supply partner from here.

What you'll do

Own supply integrations end to end. SSPs, ad servers, publishers. From the first partnership call to bid requests flowing in production. You decide the priority, you run the integration, you own the result.

Build and maintain the connectors between our exchange and external partners. The protocols, the deal mechanics, the consent signals. At this layer, the integration is the product.

Be the technical face of Publicit to supply partners. You'll be in the room with their engineering teams, speaking their language, understanding their constraints, and making sure we're the easiest demand partner they've ever onboarded.

Shape our supply strategy. Which SSPs unlock the most inventory. Which publishers are worth a direct integration. Where a single partnership opens five doors. You'll see the map before anyone else does.

Debug the hard problems. Fill rates that don't match. Bid requests that arrive malformed. Discrepancies between what a partner reports and what we see. These are the problems that nobody else in the company can solve, and they're usually urgent.

Define the standards. How we test an integration before it goes live. How we monitor it after. What our SLAs look like. What we do when a partner breaks something at 2am. You'll build the process because you've lived without one.

Work across the exchange and the platform. When an advertiser's campaign isn't delivering, the answer is usually somewhere in the supply chain. You'll work with the product and bidder teams to close the loop.

What we're looking for

Around 4 to 7 years working inside the programmatic advertising ecosystem. You've touched SSPs, DSPs, ad servers, or exchanges and you know how they actually work, not how the diagrams say they work.

You've integrated with supply partners before. You know what a bid request looks like at 3am when something is broken, and you know the difference between what the spec says and what partners actually send.

Deep protocol knowledge. OpenRTB, VAST, ads.txt, sellers.json, IAB TCF consent signals. You don't need to have memorised every field, but when someone mentions schain issues on deal ID requests you know exactly where to look.

You can code. This isn't a project management role. You'll be building integrations, writing parsers, debugging bid streams. The language matters less than the ability to ship working software against an external system you don't control.

You understand the business side of supply. CPM floors, fill rates, revenue share, exclusivity. You can have a commercial conversation with a partner and a technical conversation with their engineering team in the same meeting.

You're comfortable with ambiguity and urgency. Supply partnerships don't follow your sprint plan. A partner changes their endpoint, a new publisher wants to go live next week, a discrepancy report lands on a Friday. You handle it.

You want to build the function, not just fill the role. There is no playbook yet. You'll write it.

You want to be in the room. This role is on-site in Barcelona. Supply partnerships move on trust and speed, and both are faster in person.

Bonus points

You've worked at an SSP, DSP, or ad exchange. You know the ecosystem from the inside, not from a sales deck.

You've onboarded publishers or supply partners at scale. You know what breaks at partner number twenty that didn't break at partner number three.

You've worked with CTV or DOOH inventory specifically. The device quirks, the ad break logic, the measurement challenges. This is where our supply is growing fastest.

You've built monitoring or alerting for programmatic integrations. Discrepancy dashboards, bid stream health checks, fill rate anomaly detection.

You've worked in a European market and understand what TCF, GDPR and regional fragmentation mean for supply operations.

You've touched header bidding, prebid, or server-to-server auction setups and understand the trade-offs.

You've started something yourself or worked at an early-stage company where nobody was coming to save you.

How we hire

Application. CV plus a link to something you built or integrated that you're proud of. Two or three lines on what it was, what made it hard, and one call you made that you'd still defend.

Intro call (30 min). Us, you, mutual honesty about what this job actually is.

Technical and ecosystem conversation (60 min). We go deep on the programmatic stack. Real scenarios, real constraints, real trade-offs. No whiteboard algorithms.

Practical exercise. A small, paid, time-boxed piece of real work: a supply integration problem, your call on how to approach it, and you walk us through the solution.

Team and founders. You meet the engineers you'd be working with, then us.

We aim to close the whole process within two weeks.

Why join

The role that decides what inventory Publicit can sell. Nothing ships to a screen without a supply integration you built or approved. That's leverage.

Real infrastructure on one side, real partners on the other. You'll negotiate a deal on Monday and debug the bid stream on Wednesday. Very few roles in AdTech still work like this.

A problem nobody in Europe has solved. Aggregating CTV, DOOH, display and audio supply into a single European exchange hasn't been done. You'd be building the map.

Engineers worth arguing with. You'll work alongside people building a real-time auction engine and a self-serve platform. They'll push you. You'll push them.

Competitive salary and meaningful equity. You share in what you help build.

Barcelona. A team that works hard in the same room, and then goes and has lunch like human beings.

How we work

Extreme ownership. If something is broken, it's yours, regardless of whose job it was. We don't wait for someone else to pick up a dropped ball. We pick it up, then fix the process that dropped it.

Craftsmanship. "It works" isn't the bar. Details compound: a clean integration, a well-documented partner spec, a monitoring dashboard someone can actually read. We build things we'd be happy to have read back to us in a year.

Speed with direction. Time is the only resource we can't buy more of. We move fast, but we choose ruthlessly what to move fast on. Speed without focus is just noise.

Talent density. Every hire should raise the average. We reward contribution over tenure and give ownership to whoever earns it. Strong people want to work with strong people; that's the whole flywheel.

First principles. Advertising technology is full of things that are true only because they've always been done that way. We strip problems back to what's actually required and rebuild from there. It's the only reason a team our size can outbuild incumbents.

Be a good human. Direct, honest, kind. We give hard feedback with respect and celebrate wins without ego. We're doing something difficult, and it's better in good company.

Apply

Send your CV and a link to something you've built to [email protected] or apply through the link on this posting.

Data protection

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