VP Programmatic

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a VP Programmatic based in Netherlands.

This is a senior technical leadership role responsible for owning the programmatic advertising engineering domain end to end.

You will take full ownership of architecture, technical strategy, roadmap decisions, engineering quality, and performance across a sophisticated sell-side advertising technology stack.

The role spans client-side and server-side auction infrastructure, video, consent management, supply-chain integrity, and publisher monetization.

You will lead a compact team of approximately ten engineers through two technical team leads while remaining deeply hands-on with complex technical decisions.

You will serve as the ultimate technical escalation point for programmatic engineering challenges and represent the organization within the wider advertising technology ecosystem.

The environment is highly data-driven, AI-native, and focused on measurable performance, with significant scale across thousands of publisher websites.

This position is particularly suited to an experienced adtech engineering leader who enjoys being close to the technology, solving difficult problems, and making high-impact decisions.

Accountabilities

• Take full ownership of the web programmatic engineering domain, including architecture, technical roadmap, engineering priorities, build-or-kill decisions, hiring plans, and budget within established group parameters.
• Lead the technical strategy across client-side auction and rendering, server-side auction and rendering, video advertising technology, consent management, and related programmatic infrastructure.
• Make cross-stack architectural decisions across header bidding, Prebid Server, OpenRTB gateways, bidder integrations, wrapper technologies, and associated services.
• Own the unified technical roadmap for the programmatic domain, translating strategic priorities into practical engineering initiatives and escalating only genuine strategic ties when necessary.
• Drive performance and scalability across the bid path, with responsibility for latency, availability, auction efficiency, and wrapper performance against Core Web Vitals.
• Evaluate and optimize the placement of dynamic floors, traffic-shaping mechanisms, clearing-price models, win-rate models, and viewability capabilities within the auction infrastructure.
• Serve as the primary technical escalation point for complex client-side incidents, monetization challenges, and programmatic engineering issues across the organization.
• Act as a technical representative within the wider adtech ecosystem, including engagement with Prebid, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), industry events, and relevant external partners.
• Own engineering responsibility for consent quality, Transparency and Consent Framework (TCF) and Global Privacy Platform (GPP) purpose enforcement, Digital Services Act transparency signaling, supply-chain integrity, and protections against invalid traffic and made-for-advertising inventory.
• Ensure engineering practices support strong publisher-side quality and commercial outcomes, particularly around privacy, transparency, inventory integrity, and monetization.
• Champion AI-native engineering practices, using agentic development tools and workflows to accelerate engineering while applying strong technical judgment to validate their output.
• Lead through two technical team leads and directly manage the FastCMP engineering team, creating clarity around ownership, priorities, decision rights, and escalation paths.
• Build and maintain a high-performing player-coach culture where technical expertise, ownership, and problem-solving matter more than organizational scale.
• Ensure the programmatic engineering organization becomes increasingly autonomous while maintaining high standards for reliability, performance, technical quality, and delivery.

Requirements

• 10+ years of professional engineering experience with significant senior technical leadership experience in sell-side adtech, such as Chief Technology Officer, Vice President of Engineering, or Head of Programmatic Engineering within a wrapper vendor, Supply-Side Platform (SSP), exchange, or Prebid ecosystem.
• Deep, hands-on expertise with Prebid on both the client and server side, including the ability to understand live auction traces and the technical implications of auction configuration.
• Strong knowledge of OpenRTB 2.6 and the broader programmatic advertising ecosystem.
• Practical experience with Google Ad Manager in the context of header bidding, including line items, price granularity, and Open Bidding interactions.
• Strong understanding of modern sell-side programmatic topics, including client-side versus server-side trade-offs, TCF/GPP enforcement, Digital Services Act transparency, curation, Supply Path Optimization (SPO), Private Marketplaces (PMP), Programmatic Guaranteed (PG), dynamic floors, traffic shaping, and Demand-Side Platform (DSP) query-per-second limitations.
• Strong knowledge of publisher-side performance and Core Web Vitals, including Interaction to Next Paint (INP), Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), deferred auction initialization, code chunking, and third-party script isolation.
• Ability to read, review, and make architectural decisions across a polyglot technology environment including Go, TypeScript/Node.js, Java, PHP, and Python running on Kubernetes.
• Daily experience with AI-assisted and agentic engineering tools such as Claude Code or equivalent, together with the ability to distinguish where artificial intelligence accelerates development from where human technical judgment remains essential.
• Player-coach mindset, with enthusiasm for working closely with a compact engineering organization and personally engaging with complex technical problems.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving capabilities, with a data-driven approach to technical and commercial decisions.
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to explain complex technical topics clearly to engineering, product, commercial, and external stakeholders.
• Fluent English.
• French is considered a plus.
• Experience with large-scale Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) analytics and machine learning deployed within latency-sensitive bid paths is advantageous.
• A visible track record within Prebid open-source projects or IAB working groups is a plus.
• Strong knowledge of publisher-side privacy, consent-string quality, and browser-specific signal loss, particularly across Safari and Firefox, is advantageous.
• Experience with video advertising technologies such as VAST, Connected TV (CTV), or audio monetization is a plus.
• Commercial awareness, ownership, pragmatism, adaptability, and a strong focus on measurable results.

Benefits

• Senior leadership position with end-to-end ownership of a critical programmatic engineering domain.
• High level of autonomy and decision-making authority over architecture, roadmap, engineering priorities, and technical direction.
• Opportunity to work with large-scale programmatic infrastructure processing billions of bidding, bid-request, and analytics events.
• Exposure to a sophisticated in-house advertising technology ecosystem spanning header bidding, Supply-Side Platform technology, video, consent management, and analytics.
• Mostly remote working structure, with in-person presence for key meetings and onboarding activities.
• International environment with colleagues and teams across multiple countries.
• Close-knit, collaborative culture focused on ownership, innovation, transparency, and measurable impact.
• Professional development opportunities, including training, career check-ins, performance feedback, and potential internal mobility.
• Comprehensive health and pension benefits.
• Opportunities to attend industry conferences and participate in relevant advertising technology working groups and events.
• Opportunity to work in an AI-native engineering environment and help shape how artificial intelligence is integrated into modern software development.
• Direct exposure to senior strategic decision-making and the opportunity to influence the future direction of programmatic advertising technology.