Lead Software Engineer - AI Engineering

RTB House is a global company that provides state-of-the-art marketing technologies for top brands and agencies worldwide. Our proprietary ad-buying engine is the first in the world to be powered entirely by Deep Learning algorithms, enabling advertisers to achieve outstanding results and meet their goals at every stage of the funnel.

Join RTB House and lead our AI Engineering Lab, a team dedicated to pioneering innovation and boosting engineering productivity by leveraging the latest advancements in Agentic AI. We are looking for a hands-on technical leader with a strong, traditional software engineering background.

In this role, you won't just be writing custom code from scratch. Our approach is highly pragmatic: we build internal tools, intelligent agents, and MCPs to supercharge our engineering workflows. A critical part of our philosophy is knowing when to leverage off-the-shelf products and existing frameworks versus when to architect and build custom solutions. We need a leader who can navigate this landscape and pick the absolute best solution for the task at hand.

You will:

• Lead & Mentor: Guide a small team of software engineers, fostering a culture of technical excellence, collaboration, and continuous improvement. Set and maintain high standards for code quality and system performance.

• Drive Pragmatic Architecture: Design and develop distributed systems, internal productivity tools, and multi-agent architectures. You will own the "build vs. buy/integrate" decisions - choosing the right mix of off-the-shelf AI products, APIs, and custom-built components.

• Innovate with Agentic AI: Spearhead the evaluation, prototyping, and integration of novel Agentic AI systems, LLMs, and Model Context Protocols (MCPs) to solve complex business and engineering problems.

• Own the Execution: Manage the full development lifecycle from concept to production deployment. Ensure that the solutions we deploy are reliable, scalable, maintainable, and deliver real value.

• Collaborate Cross-Functionally: Work closely with Product Manager, Engineering Managers, and broader engineering teams to align the Lab’s innovations with company strategy and platform requirements.

Desired experience:

• Strong Software Engineering Background: Minimum of 6 years of professional experience building, deploying, and operating complex, large-scale distributed systems (e.g., microservices, event-driven architectures).

• Technical Leadership: Demonstrated experience defining technical roadmaps, mentoring engineers, leading code reviews, and driving high-level architectural decisions.

• Programming Languages: High proficiency in Python is mandatory. Experience with at least one other language (such as Java, Go, TypeScript, or Scala) is highly preferred.

• Solution Evaluation: Strong intuition and experience in evaluating third-party tools, frameworks, and vendor solutions to solve engineering problems efficiently rather than always building from scratch.

• AI/ML Integration: Experience integrating large language models (LLMs) into production applications, alongside a basic understanding of the Machine Learning lifecycle and MLOps practices.

Nice to have:

• Direct experience building internal developer tools, custom Model Context Protocols (MCPs), or using Agentic AI frameworks (e.g., Vercel AI SDK, LangChain, AutoGen).

• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) and containerization technologies (Docker, Kubernetes).

• Familiarity with the ad-tech industry and real-time bidding (RTB) systems.

We offer:

• Projects focused on high code quality – solid code reviews are our standard.

• Collaboration within an interdisciplinary, self-sufficient team including: DevOps (ensuring a great Developer Experience), database experts, backend developers, product designers, and QA engineers.

• Hardware and software tailored to your preferences – e.g. MacBook, AI tool licenses.

• Access to modern technologies and the opportunity to apply them in large-scale, high-impact projects.

• Flexible working conditions and fully remote cooperation.