Tech Lead, Ad Exchange

GumGum•Santa Monica, CA

7d•$186,000 - $215,000•Hybrid

About The Position

The Ad Exchange engineering team is responsible for the technical development and operations of our Ad Exchange technology. The Ad Exchange software handles a high volume of requests (40 million requests per minute) and is a highly distributed Java web service. Our team currently uses technologies such as Java, Spring, MySQL, Kafka, Aerospike, ScyllaDb, Memcached, and more. This role will lead their team to success, planning and executing projects across the stack by defining technical requirements, estimating level of effort, scoping projects to meet deadlines, and managing agile processes. The Tech Lead will work closely with product owners, engineering teams, and other stakeholders to deliver projects on time and with high quality. This will require identifying and resolving risks and blockers, reviewing code, and providing architectural guidance to ensure scalable, maintainable solutions. You’ll be expected to take ownership of complex features, mentor engineers, and influence technical direction. The Tech Lead will also begin to develop management and leadership skills, fostering relationships with their team and others they work with, setting best practices, giving feedback, playing an active role with hiring and training, and fostering a deep knowledge of the business. Note: GumGum fosters a flexible work environment, offering GumGummers the ability to work either in-office or remotely/from home. However, for occasional in-person collaboration, we kindly ask that this position be located within a 'commutable' distance to our office.

Requirements

6+ years of professional software engineering experience, with deep technical proficiency in Java and the Spring Framework.
Proven track record of shipping production-grade systems utilizing AWS and distributed technologies like Kafka, Aerospike, ScyllaDB, or equivalent heavy-data solutions.
Experience architecting or working within ultra-high-volume transactional systems handling greater than 100k transactions/second.
Solid foundation in RDBMS, with strong hands-on experience designing and optimizing MySQL or similar relational databases.
Strong analytical thinker with a proven ability to debug, optimize, and solve complex logic within highly multi-threaded applications.
Demonstrated experience coaching, mentoring, and leveling up engineering peers to foster a high-performing team culture.
Exceptional communication skills with a history of seamlessly partnering with Product, Engineering, and business stakeholders across remote teams and time zones.
A sharp ability to take vague, complex stakeholder requests and systematically break them down into highly organized, actionable technical tasks.

Nice To Haves

A Computer Science degree is a definite plus, but relevant production experience is what we value most.

Responsibilities

Lead the design and delivery of high-volume, high-traffic ad exchange web services leveraging Java, Spring, MySQL, ScyllaDB, and Aerospike.
Take full ownership of the system lifecycle, defining the long-term architectural roadmap and continuously experimenting with new frameworks to optimize performance.
Establish technical guidelines, set development best practices, and conduct comprehensive design and code reviews to maintain high-quality standards.
Translate complex stakeholder and customer requests into clear technical requirements, mapping engineering efforts directly to business impact.
Own the agile process (scrums, sprint planning, retros), accurately estimate levels of effort, and break down large initiatives into actionable Jira tasks.
Foster a high-performing culture by conducting thoughtful 1:1s, providing actionable feedback, and delegating impactful tasks to scale team capabilities.
Partner with management to optimize the interview process, design technical evaluation questions, and spearhead robust onboarding plans for new hires.
Act as the primary technical point of contact, seamlessly collaborating with cross-functional teams to align timelines and proactively clear engineering bottlenecks.