Director, Engineering

at Index Exchange
Toronto, Ontario, Canada

About Index:

We shaped the earliest forms of ad tech, and we’re looking for the technical expertise to help shape its future. Our customers have unique problems that can only be solved at internet scale, and that’s where the technical skills of our team make a real difference.

Our exchange handles more than 450 billion requests every day (for comparison Google serves an estimated 9 billion searches a day), all running in our own global data centers. Every member of our technology team has an enormous amount of autonomy in building and managing our systems to support and enable our growing level of scale. Through the transparency of our technology, dedication to innovation and integrity, and long-standing customer relationships, we lead through change.

What’s it like to work at Index?

We have more than 600 Indexers around the globe dedicated to building a safe and transparent marketplace that provides a trusted experience for consumers. Index is an exciting and fast-paced place to work. We’re built on our values of change, support, learning and teaching, trust, and intention. We pride ourselves on our independence and openness, not only in our technology, but in our teams, too. Our diverse and inclusive culture celebrates how we can leverage our unique differences to help drive Index forward.

About the Role:

We’re looking for a Director, Engineering who can bring their depth and breadth of experience to help us continue to scale while maintaining high standards for efficiency and technical excellence. This is a senior leadership position that requires strong technical context, a foundation in organizational design and process, but more than anything, leadership fundamentals that allow you to coach, guide and develop your leaders and your organization. In this role you’ll empower your teams to embrace end to end ownership of your products and systems, and work to define a clear vision and strategy for your team to execute on.

A successful leader in this role will develop a strong partnership with Product and Engineering leaders, work to establish a mutual roadmap that carves a path which delivers technical excellence and strong business outcomes. They are experimental, data driven, know when to take risks and when to build a solid foundation. This role is for an active leader who is a team and platform builder and someone who can become directly involved in technology decisions while growing the team to support it. They are experienced in full stack application development and understand the foundations that must be in place to support an enterprise level application.

Here’s What You’ll be Doing:

Vision: Have a deep understanding of Index and its products and processes and stay informed on the latest events in the industry, whether product or technology changes. Drive initiatives that produce positive outcomes across divisions.

Leadership: We need someone who can help us scale. That means hiring the right people, helping people grow both technically and personally, helping teams improve the way they work, creating a strong sense of ownership at the individual and team level, mentoring junior leaders and identifying and developing new leaders. We need you to have proven leadership ability and experience leading and managing multiple cross-functional teams and both individual contributors and first-line managers.

Technical: You have a passion for technology, experience developing systems at scale, on multiple tech stacks and love launching as much as you love delivering results. You develop a technical vision and strategy for your organization and rally your team behind it. You also have experience driving the adoption of technical best practices and leading by example.

Communication: As a leader you need to provide consistent and steady feedback to your team – both positive and constructively critical. You are transparent with your team, and work to keep stakeholders informed of progress and issues. You can represent your team and communicate accomplishments and challenges outwards. You communicate well with other senior leaders and can partner to drive collaborative outcomes.

Software Life Cycle: You are expert at delivering major commercial systems in large distributed Agile environments, and understand practices associated with different methodologies and when to use them. Understanding the spirit of Agile, you’ll work with teams and stakeholders to find ways to solve problems, experiment, learn and iterate on solutions without getting stuck on specific practices. You understand the components of software development, how to manage them and ensure high quality execution.

Experimentation through to Scaling: You understand that the path to finding the best outcomes is by understanding the problem and gathering data on the best solution. Experimentation should be ubiquitous and inexpensive but building a world class globally distributed system must scale intentionally and with quality and reliability.

Community: While you will have direct ownership and accountability over your product area, you’ll be expected to have an impact on Engineering and Index as a whole. Take a moment to share your experiences at a community Agora, contribute towards improving our best practices, or mentor an engineer from another team. We strongly believe in supporting each other to make for a better Index Exchange.

Here's What You Need:

• A Bachelor’s or post-graduate degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent
• Setting the agenda for multiple teams across a high performing Engineering organization and driving through to significant outcomes
• Experience with enterprise scale API, UI development, authz/authn and i18n/l10n
• A solid understanding of DevOps, Agile and broad engineering best practices
• The ability to work and build and grow teams virtually, ideally with globally distributed teams.
• Experience in Ad Tech an asset
• Experience with high volume, low latency distributed systems an asset

Why You’ll Love Working Here:

• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision plans for you and your dependents
• Paid time off, health days, and personal obligation days plus flexible work schedules
• Competitive retirement matching plans
• Equity packages
• Generous parental leave available to birthing, non-birthing, and adoptive parents
• Annual well-being allowance plus fitness discounts and group wellness activities
• Commuter benefits and discounts, where available
• Employee assistance program
• Mental health first aid program that provides an in-the-moment point of contact and reassurance
• One day of volunteer time off per year and a donation-matching program
• Bi-weekly town halls and regular community-led team events
• Multiple resources and programming to support continuous learning
• A workplace that supports a diverse, equitable, and inclusive environment

Equal employment opportunity:

At Index Exchange, we believe that successful products are built by teams just as diverse as the audience who uses them. As such, we are committed to equal employment opportunities. We celebrate diversity of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or expression, or veteran status. Additionally, we realize that diversity is deeper than any status or classification—diversity is the human experience. For those who show grit, passion, and humility—Index will welcome you.

Accessibility for applicants with disabilities:

Index Exchange welcomes and encourages individuals with disabilities to apply to work with us. If you require an accommodation, please share the details of your request and any information how we can assist you with the hiring recruiter when they contact you. Index Exchange will make reasonable efforts to ensure accommodation requests are met throughout the recruitment process.

Index Everywhere, Index Anywhere:

Our corporate headquarters are in Toronto, with major offices in New York, Montreal, Kitchener, London, San Francisco, and many other global cities. As a major global advertising exchange, we are committed to operating as a tightly knit global team and embracing and empowering talent wherever our colleagues may be.