Staff Software Engineer (Advertising Platform)

About GameChanger:

GameChanger is a remote-first, dynamic tech company based in New York City, focused on solving challenges in youth sports. We believe in the transformative impact of youth sports on leadership, teamwork, and confidence, shaping the next generation. If you love sports or building innovative products, this is the team for you.

The Position:

As a Staff Software Engineer, you will define and drive the technical strategy for our advertising platform, expanding how advertising is delivered across live sports experiences. You will serve as a technical leader, shaping architecture, identifying long-term platform investments, and building reliable, scalable, and adaptable advertising systems.

You will bring expertise in advertising technology to evolve our current capabilities while preparing for sophisticated experiences in video and server-side advertising. Collaborate closely with Engineering, Product, Design, Data, and business partners to translate advertising opportunities into scalable solutions.

This role involves identifying technical opportunities and risks, establishing architectural direction, mentoring engineers, and influencing technical decisions across teams intersecting with advertising, video, and monetization. You will report to an Engineering leader in the Ads space.

What You’ll Do:

• Define and drive the technical strategy for our advertising platform, establishing an architecture that evolves with our product and advertising business.
• Provide technical leadership for current and future advertising capabilities, including video ads, server-side advertising, connected TV experiences, programmatic advertising, and new ad formats.
• Partner with Engineering and Product leadership to identify technical investments that unlock new advertising capabilities and revenue opportunities.
• Lead architecture and system design for complex, cross-functional initiatives spanning advertising, video, backend services, clients, and data systems.
• Evaluate architectural approaches and third-party advertising technologies, communicating trade-offs across scalability, reliability, user experience, implementation complexity, and business needs.
• Improve the reliability, observability, scalability, and maintainability of our advertising systems and integrations.
• Establish patterns and abstractions to make it easier and safer for teams to build and experiment with advertising experiences.
• Partner closely with engineers across video, client, platform, data, and monetization teams to ensure seamless integration of advertising capabilities.
• Mentor engineers and raise the technical bar through design reviews, architectural guidance, code reviews, and knowledge sharing.
• Build and maintain technical documentation, architectural plans, and long-term technical roadmaps.
• Stay current on changes in the advertising technology ecosystem and help the organization understand relevant emerging technologies.
• Participate in an occasional on-call rotation with the team.

Who You Are:

• You are a technical leader capable of balancing long-term architecture and hands-on implementation.
• You take ownership of ambiguous technical spaces, identifying critical problems and creating a path forward independently.
• You consider the long-term impact of technical decisions on the platform.
• You excel at breaking down complex systems and communicating technical trade-offs to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• You enjoy mentoring engineers and guiding teams toward better architectural and engineering decisions.
• You stay curious about emerging technologies and apply sound engineering judgment to identify meaningful value.

Experience:

• 8+ years of professional software development experience, with demonstrated technical leadership on complex or large-scale systems.
• Experience designing and evolving distributed, high-scale production systems.
• Professional experience architecting and delivering advertising technology systems or integrations, with a strong foundation in backend engineering and experience supporting video advertising.
• Experience with one or more areas of the modern advertising ecosystem, such as ad serving, video ad delivery, SSAI/CSAI, VAST, programmatic advertising, or header bidding.
• Experience leading architecture and technical strategy across projects involving multiple engineers or teams.
• Strong understanding of API design, distributed systems, reliability, observability, and system performance.
• Experience mentoring senior engineers and influencing technical decisions beyond immediate projects and teams.
• Experience with live or streaming video systems is strongly preferred.
• Experience with connected TV advertising or server-side ad insertion is preferred.
• Experience with Google Ad Manager or similar ad-serving platforms is preferred.
• Experience with TypeScript, Node.js, AWS, Redis, and PostgreSQL is preferred.