Senior/Lead Software Engineer

About WPP Media
WPP is the creative transformation company. We use the power of creativity to build better futures for our people, planet, clients and communities. For more information, visit wpp.com. WPP Media is WPP’s global media collective. In a world where media is everywhere and in everything, we bring the best platform, people, and partners together to create limitless opportunities for growth. For more information, visit wppmedia.com

About Choreograph: A Leading WPP Media Brand
Choreograph is WPP’s global data products and technology company. We’re on a mission to transform marketing by building the fastest, most connected data platform that bridges marketing strategy to scaled activation. We work with agencies and clients to transform the value of data by bringing together technology, data and analytics capabilities. We deliver this through the Open Media Studio, an AI-enabled media and data platform for the next era of advertising. We’re endlessly curious. Our team of thinkers, builders, creators and problem solvers are over 1,000 strong, across 20 markets around the world.

Who We Are Looking For
Our team consists of 100+ engineers, designers, data, and product people, working in small inter-disciplinary teams closely with creative agencies, media agencies, and with our customers, to develop and scale our DCO platform, a leading digital advertising optimization suite that delivers amazing outcomes for brands and audiences. As a Senior Engineer you will work side by side with a Product Manager, a Design Lead, and your engineering team to design, build, deliver and operate purposeful solutions. The role is a hands on development role, involving contributing to product strategy, crafting scalable and reliable architectures, developing features, building automations, owning tests, coaching and supporting junior engineers, and contributing to the wider team’s evolution of our principles and practices, and the tools we use. The role has no line management responsibilities. Our platforms are built with Clojure, employ a polylith architecture, are deployed using CI/CD, heavily exploit automation, and run on AWS, GCP, k8s, Snowflake and more. We serve 9 petabytes and 77 billion objects annually, which amounts to 20 billion ad impressions across the globe. You’ll play a leading role in significantly scaling this further.

Skills And Experience
At WPP Media, we believe in the power of our culture and our people. It’s what elevates us to deliver exceptional experiences for both our clients and each other. In this role it will be critical to embrace WPP & WPP Media’s shared core values: Be Extraordinary by Leading Collectively to Inspire transformational Creativity. Create an Open environment by Balancing People and Client Experiences by Cultivating Trust. Lead Optimistically by Championing Growth and Development to Mobilize the Enterprise. Lead an engineering team, overseeing and participating in all stages of development, delivery and operations, together with Product and Design leaders. Architect solutions that are simple, scalable, reliable, secure, maintainable, and make a measurable impact. Develop and deliver new features, maintain our product, and drive growth to hit team KPIs. As a part of this, undertake hands-on development and engineering tasks with your team and other teams, to deliver production solutions. Employ and champion modern pragmatic engineering principles, practices, and tooling, including TDD/BDD/ATDD, XP, QA Engineering, Trunk Based Development, Continuous Delivery, automation, DevSecOps, and Site Reliability Engineering. Contribute to, and take a leadership role in, driving ongoing improvements to our engineering principles, practices, and tooling. Provide support & mentorship to junior engineers, prioritising continuous learning and development. Develop and maintain a contemporary understanding of AdTech developments, industry standards, partner and competitor platform developments, and commercial models, from an engineering perspective. Combined these insights with technical expertise to contribute to our strategy and plans, influence product design, shape our roadmap, and help plan delivery. Proven experience designing, building, and operating concurrent, distributed systems. Experience with advertising technology (AdTech) highly desired. Proven experience and a passion for developing and operating full stack production systems in Clojure, k8s, and AWS or GCP. ClojureScript, JavaScript, TypeScript, React, Java, Python, and Terraform experience highly desirable. Proven experience leading teams, designing simple / scalable / reliable architectures, building, and operating concurrent, distributed systems, solving difficult and novel problems, and leading engineering and operational teams working in this space. Proven experience in developing data structures and algorithms. Experience working with ML/AI highly desirable. Proven experience contributing to product strategy development with Product Management teams. Experience in SaaS product engineering and operations highly desirable. Proven experience in modern software development and testing practices and implementing these in teams, with a willingness to share, partner and coach engineers, product people, and operations through pragmatic and effective development and delivery practices. Experience in employing TDD, BDD or ATDD highly desirable. Proven experience shaping and evolving the principles, practices, and tooling supporting agile, testing/QA, DevSecOps, automation, SRE. Experience in Trunk Based Development, XP, & implementing CI/CD highly desirable. A focus on continuous learning and improving, both technically and professionally, in your industry, for you and your teams. Demonstrated resilience, with experience working in ambiguous situations. Strong English, excellent influencing and communication skills, and excellent documentation skills.

Life at WPP Media & Benefits
Our passion for shaping the next era of media includes investing in our employees to help them do their best work, and we’re just as committed to employee growth as we are to responsible media investment. WPP Media employees can tap into the global WPP Media & WPP networks to pursue their passions, grow their networks, and learn at the cutting edge of marketing and advertising. We have a variety of employee resource groups and host frequent in-office events showcasing team wins, sharing thought leadership, and celebrating holidays and milestone events. Our benefits include competitive medical, group retirement plans, vision, and dental insurance, significant paid time off, preferential partner discounts, and employee mental health awareness days. WPP Media 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. 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. Please note this is a UK based role and requires individuals to have the right to work in this location Please read our Privacy Notice for more information on how we process the information you provide. While we appreciate all applications received, only those candidates selected for an interview will be contacted.