Staff Engineer — Ad Monetization Architecture, Glance

We're building the ad monetization platform behind Glance - the lock screen and mobile surfaces that 100M+ people across India, Southeast Asia, Japan, Brazil and the US see every day , roughly half of them actively engaging. Every ad request carries real money , a real user's screen and an OEM partner's trust, and is decided in milliseconds on a low-end Android phone.

We're starting a focused new team of senior engineers in Bangalore. As its Staff Engineer (individual contributor , tech-lead track), you'll set the architecture, hold the quality bar , and be the person the team turns to when a design decision could move revenue.

What you will do

Own the architecture of the money path

• Design a demand-source-agnostic serving layer: any exchange, ad server or deal plugs in behind one contract we own (OpenRTB 2.6 with Glance extensions).
• Keep decisioning — auction, floors, priority and ad-load policy — in our platform, never in adapters or partner consoles.
• Define the rendering contract the client SDK depends on (native, V AST , MRAID/HTML).
• Make the big calls and write them down: ADRs, latency budgets, build-versus-use decisions with InMobi platform teams.

Serve ads inside the Glance experience

• Build ad slots into Glance's content feed, with ad load balanced against dismiss rate, session depth and retention.
• Design for prefetch: ads fetched ahead of time and shown later , sometimes offline - caching, expiry , pacing and delayed impression beacons all have to hold.
• Own per-user frequency and ad load across every demand source, within latency, battery and memory budgets on low-end Android.

Set the bar and grow the team

• Run design reviews across serving, SDK, automation and revenue data, and own the API contracts between them.
• Make "what proves this?" the first question on any pricing or serving change, AI-assisted code included: replay evals, invariant checks, auto-rollback canaries.
• Be accountable for integrity gates: creative safety , invalid traffic, policy compliance.
• Review revenue-event and partner-reconciliation design so the numbers hold up to OEM audit.
• Mentor senior engineers into area leads, and make sure every service has a second owner

What we expect

• 10+ years, including ownership of a low-latency , high-throughput system where a bad deploy shows up as lost revenue - ad serving, payments, trading or pricing.
• Distributed systems depth: partitioning, replication, consistency , failure modes, graceful degradation.
• Deep, hands-on Java and Spring Boot (our serving stack), including JVM/GC tuning for low latency; comfortable in Python (F astAPI) for ML and data services.
• Cloud (GCP or A WS), Kubernetes and CI/CD , designing for cost of serving, not just uptime
• Event pipelines at scale (Kafka, Spark or Flink), reconciled against an external source of truth
• Safe releases without a manual pass: contract and replay testing, canaries, automated rollback, SL Os you've been paged on RFCs and ADRs that lead to decisions, and influence across teams you don't manage

If you match most of this but not all, we'd still like to hear from you.

Nice to have

• Sell-side ad tech: SSPs, ad servers, Prebid / Prebid Server , Google Ad Manager.
• OpenRTB, V AST , MRAID and OM SDK; privacy signals (T CF , GPP) and supply-chain transparency (schain, sellers.json, app-ads. txt)
• Android or mobile SDK work under size, battery and cold-start budgets
• Consent frameworks (DPDP , GDPR, L GPD), invalid-traffic defences, or partner-billing systems that external partners audit

Why join us

• Shape it from day one: set the architecture and standards of a new team, not maintain someone else's
• Room to grow: become the org's architecture authority as the team scales, or move into engineering management