Software Engineer
WPP is the trusted growth partner for the world’s leading brands.
We unite cutting-edge media intelligence and data solutions, world-class creativity, next-generation production, transformative enterprise solutions and expert strategic counsel in a single company - powered by exceptional talent and our agentic marketing platform, WPP Open, to help our clients navigate change, capture opportunity and deliver transformational growth.
We work with the world's most valuable brands and have global reach across 100+ markets, with deep local expertise.
Our people are the key to our success. We're committed to fostering a culture of creativity, belonging and continuous learning, attracting and developing the brightest talent, and providing exciting career opportunities that help our people grow.
For more information, visit WPP.com.
About Open Intelligence
The Activation team within Open Intelligence builds the foundational data infrastructure and high-performance edge services that support WPP’s global media ecosystem.
Our edge services currently handle more than 60,000 classification requests per second, while our contextual classification pipelines process approximately 10,000 requests per second. We operate across the US and UK and are expanding into EMEA and APAC.
We are an engineering-led team focused on building robust, scalable and highly reliable systems for privacy-conscious data products and activation services.
Why We’re Hiring
Open Intelligence is expanding its privacy-preserving data products and global infrastructure. As we extend our operations across EMEA and APAC and deepen integrations with major supply-side partners, we need engineers who can help us scale resilient, performant and compliant activation systems.
This role offers the opportunity to contribute to the next phase of our growth by building services and integrations that remain reliable as our global footprint and product capabilities expand.
What You’ll Do
- Discuss, design and implement technical solutions for backend services and API integrations, while reviewing code in line with team standards.
- Build and maintain orchestration and gateway components, including workflow steps, partner API clients, internal APIs and services that connect activation systems.
- Collaborate with Product, Lead Engineers and sibling teams across audience, data and performance to deliver reliable production services.
- Strengthen third-party and internal integrations through authentication, retries, idempotency, rate limiting and clear error handling.
- Write and maintain unit, integration and contract tests, contributing to CI/CD practices and safe releases.
- Improve observability and auditability through structured logging, metrics, tracing and traceable actions aligned with campaign and orchestration requirements.
- Take part in operational ownership by investigating incidents, fixing bugs, updating runbooks, addressing technical debt and sharing knowledge with the team.
Who You’ll Be Working With
You’ll join an engineering-led team working closely with Product, Lead Engineers and colleagues across audience, data and performance. You’ll receive guidance from experienced engineers while taking ownership of the services and integrations you help build and maintain.
What You’ll Need
- +3y Professional experience in software engineering, typically around three or more years in backend, platform or API-focused roles-or equivalent practical experience.
- Experience building and operating backend services and APIs in production, including REST/HTTP services or webhooks.
- Strong proficiency in at least one backend language such as Python, Go, Java or Kotlin. Python is preferred.
- Experience integrating external or internal APIs, including authentication, pagination, request and response handling, error models and operational debugging.
- Experience with Git, unit and integration testing, contract testing or equivalent quality practices, and CI/CD.
- Experience with a cloud platform such as GCP, AWS or Azure, plus containerized deployment. Exposure to Docker or Kubernetes is beneficial.
- Familiarity with asynchronous or event-driven systems such as queues, background jobs or workflow steps, together with an interest in infrastructure as code and production observability.
Nice to Have
You do not need to meet every point below. Experience in any of these areas would be welcome:
- Workflow or orchestration systems, including state machines, durable jobs or schedulers.
- Small internal tools or user interfaces that consume the APIs you build.
- AdTech or MarTech data, SSP/DSP concepts or campaign activation terminology.
- Working in a monorepo or large shared codebase.
- Handling sensitive data and applying privacy principles in distributed systems.
- Infrastructure as code, such as Terraform, and mature observability practices.
- AI-assisted development, prompt engineering or agentic and tool-registry patterns, used thoughtfully and responsibly.
Who you are:
You're open: We are inclusive and collaborative; we encourage the free exchange of ideas; we respect and celebrate diverse views. We are open-minded: to new ideas, new partnerships, new ways of working.
You're optimistic: We believein the power of creativity, technology and talent to create brighter futures or our people, our clients and our communities. We approach all that we do with conviction: to try the new and to seek the unexpected.
You're extraordinary: we are stronger together: through collaboration we achieve the amazing. We are creative leaders and pioneers of our industry; we provide extraordinary every day.
What we'll give you:
Passionate, inspired people - We aim to create a culture in which people can do extraordinary work.
Scale and opportunity - We offer the opportunity to create, influence and complete projects at a scale that is unparalleled in the industry.
Challenging and stimulating work - Unique work and the opportunity to join a group of creative problem solvers. Are you up for the challenge?
#LI-Hybrid
We believe the best work happens when we're together, fostering creativity, collaboration, and connection. That's why we’ve adopted a hybrid approach, with teams in the office around four days a week. If you require accommodations or flexibility, please discuss this with the hiring team during the interview process.
WPP is an equal opportunity employer and considers applicants for all positions without discrimination or regard to particular characteristics. We are committed to fostering a culture of respect in which everyone feels they belong and has the same opportunities to progress in their careers.