Principal Software Engineer (Remote)

Company Description

Vericast is a leading marketing solutions company, delivering actionable insights and expertise through its Valassis and Harland Clarke omnichannel solutions, to help more than 70,000 businesses engage with their customers. Every day, Vericast influences purchasing and transaction behavior of more than 120 million households – impacting where they eat, shop, buy, save and borrow. Follow Vericast on LinkedIn and Twitter to learn how Vericast drives commerce.

Job Description

The Ad Optimization team plays a central role in our digital advertising platform, building the models and control systems that decide how to place bids on ads to maximize their impact and efficiency. Our team works with data scientists to analyze ad opportunities at scale (over 100 billion per day) to find hidden value and constantly improve ad serving for each of our thousands of campaigns. We determine bidding algorithms that must make decisions in milliseconds to win at the right price against hundreds of other partners competing for the same opportunities. We also build controllers that measure success, balance competing concerns, and quickly respond to changes in the digital advertising ecosystem.

The Ad Optimization team works closely with other engineering teams like Ad Infrastructure & Services and Performance Analytics, as well as operations teams like Business Analytics.

We’re looking for a problem solver to join an experienced team of engineers and data scientists that use data to bring new products to life and keep our technology competitive in a constantly evolving marketplace. We write code primarily in Scala and Python to use Apache Spark to analyze and exploit an abundance of information from many sources to find and win the best ads for our clients.

What you’ll do:

• Build systems that use data to solve problems and measure the success of our advertising platform
• Work with data science to design and improve models for decision making
• Create new data and tools to measure and monitor performance
• Coordinate with other engineering, analytics, and operations teams to build and improve our advertising products
• Collaborate with your fellow team members to deliver high-quality solutions

Qualifications

Who you are:

• Fluent in Scala, Python, or Java
• Experienced working with batch data engineering and “big data” technology (such as MapReduce or Spark)
• Able to solve open-ended problems, identify the right requirements, and measure success
• Capable of diving into complex datasets to find answers to your questions
• Excited about working in a fast-paced environment with a lot of experimentation and moving parts
• At least 10 years industry experience

Technologies:

• Scala
• Python
• Java
• PySpark
• HDFS

Third Party Tools:

• Jupyter
• Grafana
• Git
• Jenkins
• Docker
• Kubernetes
• Rundeck

Additional Information

Salary: $180,000 – $200,000

Position is eligible for an annual bonus incentive program

The ultimate compensation offered for the position will depend upon several factors such as skill level, cost of living, experience, and responsibilities.

Vericast offers a generous total rewards benefits package that includes medical, dental and vision coverage, 401K matching and generous PTO allowance. A wide variety of additional benefits like life insurance, employee assistance and pet insurance are also available, not to mention smart and friendly coworkers!