Senior Product Engineer

Upwave: The Analytics Platform for Brand Advertising.

Upwave is the leading analytics software platform giving brands, agencies, and media partners a unified, cross-media solution to measure brand advertising. Providing a deterministic, real-time view of brand advertising investment, Upwave’s automated platform allows advertisers to optimize TV, CTV, digital, social and cross-channel campaigns towards audience accuracy and reach, brand lift, and person’s lifted– with campaign-level and portfolio views.

Our customers are Fortune 500 companies across multiple verticals - including CPG, food & beverage, consumer technology & telecom, and financial services - as well as the world’s largest advertising agencies and media platforms and publishers.

We are unapologetically supportive of brand advertising, and work hard every day to prove its value; we know if companies can measure the value of those dollars, they’ll spend more. Brand advertising pays for not only the movies we watch and music we hear, but the journalism we read and the information we access. In short, brand advertising supports the free flow of information through society. So, we’re proud to be the first company dedicated to using data science to show enterprises the true effectiveness of their brand spend.

We are backed by leading venture investors (Y Combinator, Uncork Capital, Bloomberg Beta, Initialized Capital, PivotNorth, Ridge Ventures, Industry Ventures, Conductive Ventures,) and leading MarTech founders & CEOs.

We’re a humble but ambitious team that takes its work seriously but never ourselves. Come join us.

What you will be doing:

• Navigating partner relationships: This involves conducting introductory technical scope outs to determine requirements, finding areas of mutual interest, establishing high-level expectations of commitment, and ultimately converting these discussions into formal agreements.
• Take ownership of the partner pipeline infrastructure:You will be responsible for overseeing and maintaining the infrastructure related to our partner pipeline. This includes the architecture, design and development of custom partner integrations, as well as external-facing dashboard, APIs and documentation.
• Participate in various system components that form our infrastructure. Your valuable contributions will extend beyond the partner pipeline, allowing you to have a meaningful impact on multiple facets of our system architecture. You will actively participate in designing and implementing other components such as the ingress pixel pipeline, surveywall, analysis pipeline, customer dashboard and internal tooling.
• You will be writing code. You will be contributing to our microservices, data pipelines, and front-end dashboards. Currently our backend is written in several JVM-based languages, deployed on AWS using infrastructure-as-code and React for our dashboards.
• Collaborate closely with our Product team. Ensure a seamless integration of software engineering and product development efforts throughout the development lifecycle.
• You will perform DevOps duties. You will manage deployments, monitor infrastructure and contribute to our tooling. Our system is not critically time-sensitive and the majority of issues are handled during business hours.
• Technical customer support. Everyone on our team provides technical customer support for issues escalated from our Support team. At our organization, technical customer support is viewed as an opportunity for continuous learning, growth, and empathy towards our customers' needs.

About you:

• You have experience with end-to-end development of powerful, intuitive, highly-functional products for professional end users. You’ve built robust, high-quality API-consuming applications before. You don't need to be familiar our particular tech stack, but you should have built real RDBMS-backed backends in a framework like Spring Boot, Django, Rails, or Express and should have built SPA frontends in a modern JavaScript framework like React, Vue, or Angular.
• You deeply understand and enjoy programming. You’re familiar with the modern landscape of user interface frameworks, web/API/microservice frameworks, databases, and cloud platforms. You know which approaches to embrace and avoid, and when to reach for a new tool vs. relying on a proven one.
• You are able to lead technical discussions with potential customers. You understand the need to create a product our customers need and love and articulate our product value.
• You value and practice rigorous software engineering methodology. You excel in effective teamwork, demonstrating careful planning and organization of your work. You consistently develop software that is both easy to maintain and understand, while also adhering to rigorous testing and code review protocols.
• You believe developers should operate the systems they build. You think about observability, cost, and reliability as a fundamental part of software design and you design systems that are easy to operate and maintain.
• People tend to look to you as a leader and respect your expertise, even in roles where you don't have formal authority. You have experience mentoring junior teammates, and you understand that healthy human systems are essential to developing and maintaining healthy technical systems.
• You’re humble and curious. You care about fully understanding a particular topic and want to learn more about why it works and the way it does. You understand that you’ll be responsible for making sure we end up with great systems by making sure the best ideas win, even if those ideas aren’t yours.
• You’re a get-things-done type who fixes problems instead of worrying about who’s responsible for fixing them. You own and take responsibility for your actions and your work and you want to stake out meaningful areas of expertise within the constant swirl and change of startup life.
• You believe that well-oiled, high-trust teams are more effective than the sum of their technical expertise. You know that participating effectively in a team takes deliberate effort and compassionate, effective, and non-violent communication. Upwave works hard to foster a welcoming, inclusive climate where people feel safe and actually want to work with each other. You’re comfortable being evaluated for what you add to the team, not just what you add to the codebase.

Skillset we’re looking for:

• Experience comparable to an average engineer with 8+ years of experience
• Adtech experience with marketing technology, advertising technology, or market research companies.
• Experience working with a JVM-based language (particularly Java, Kotlin, or Groovy) and a Spring-based web framework (particularly Spring Boot or Groovy-on-Grails).
• Strong familiarity and comfort with data management both through RDBMS (particularly MySQL) and NoSQL stores (particularly Presto and DynamoDB).
• Experience working with React/Redux.
• Experience working on cloud-native applications (particularly on AWS), particularly using Kubernetes and Terraform
• Experience at a startup or a fast-growing company.

Why You’ll Like Working Here:

• Upwave is an engineering-first company. We believe high velocity comes from high efficiency, not high effort. And we believe that the development we do must be sustainable for the entire team. We set priorities rather than deadlines, we don’t crunch, we work reasonable hours, and engineers and managers actually take vacations.
• Upwavers treat each other well. We screen for people who are unusually caring, and who want to collaborate and know how to do it effectively and compassionately.
• Upwave is actually disrupting (in the Clayton Christensen sense) a major industry by offering functionality that our users can’t find anywhere else, at a technology-enabled price point that our services-oriented competitors structurally can’t match. The media industry is going through major tectonic shifts, and at Upwave you’ll both observe and influence the media industry’s reinvention.
• You’ll work with modern technologies (e.g. React, Kubernetes, AWS) to solve cutting edge problems. Upwave is not just another software-as-a-service tool; we’re an intuitive user-interface on top of a deep and complex business workflow that requires:
• collecting hundreds of billions of advertising events,
• using them intelligently to collect consumer sentiment data,
• applying recently published (and in some cases, internally invented) causal inference and machine learning techniques to derive statistically valid conclusions,
• presenting those conclusions to end users in a way that empowers them to make genuinely better business decisions.
• We’re “post product market fit”, meaning that we’re far enough along in our journey to know that we’re building something real users find valuable enough to pay (handsomely) for. But we’re playing in a huge market, and we’re early enough along that each individual engineer and engineering leader can still have a pivotal impact on our product and on the overall trajectory and success of our business.
• We’re a remote-first team, with members spanning half the globe (but only one half, to ensure everyone can talk live when we need to). You’ll work with extremely talented engineers from different states, countries, and cultures, and you’ll get to learn about their diverse backgrounds and fascinating day-to-day experiences and life stories.
• We offer highly competitive compensation, benefits, and employee equity.

Additional Information:

The annual base salary range for this role is $150,000 to $175,000 + equity + benefits. Our salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location. The range displayed on each job posting reflects the minimum and maximum target for the new hire salaries for the position across all US locations. Within the range, individual pay is determined by work location and additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for your preferred location during the hiring process. Please note that the compensation details listed in US role postings reflect the base salary only, and do not include bonus, equity, or benefits.

Upwave is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.