VP Programmatic

About the role

Sparteo, an independent suite of AI-powered advertising technologies, is looking for a VP Programmatic to take full ownership of its web programmatic engineering domain. The current CTO moves to group-level topics, and you become his direct strategic partner, owning architecture, roadmap and build-or-kill decisions. The domain covers Actirise (Flashbid header bidding), Viously (video), Meetscale (SSP) and FastCMP (consent), with two team leads and the FastCMP team reporting to you.

Key responsibilities

• Arbitrate cross-stack technical choices (client wrapper vs Prebid Server, model placement, Go vs PBS-Java gateways) and keep the stacks coherent.
• Own the technical and build-or-kill roadmap, with product owning commercial priority.
• Set latency and availability SLOs on the bid path and Core Web Vitals across ~4,000 sites, including dynamic floors and traffic shaping.
• Act as the final escalation point for client technical crises and hard monetization questions, and represent Sparteo externally at Prebid, IAB and industry events.
• Own TCF/GPP enforcement, DSA transparency signalling, supply-chain integrity (schain, sellers.json) and MFA/IVT.
• Lead hiring plans and budgets within group envelopes.

Required profile

• 10+ years in engineering, with senior technical leadership in sell-side adtech (ex-CTO, VP Engineering or Head of Programmatic Engineering).
• Fluent English; French is a nice-to-have.
• Player-coach temperament, energized by a compact team.

Required skills

• Deep, hands-on knowledge of Prebid (client and server) and OpenRTB 2.6.
• Google Ad Manager and header bidding.
• Ability to read, review and arbitrate a polyglot estate (Go, TypeScript/Node.js, Java, PHP, Python) on Kubernetes.
• Daily AI-assisted engineering practice (Claude Code or equivalent) and the will to champion it.