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AdRoll Engineering

With over 25,000 customers in more than 100 countries, AdRoll is the world’s most widely used “real-time bidding” retargeting platform. What is real-time bidding? It means we help companies intelligently bid on advertising spaces billions of times a day in fractions of seconds. We manage a global infrastructure that handles billions of requests, crunches big data on the spot and provides an easy-to-use self-service platform to our advertisers.

We take our work seriously but not ourselves. Join a growing team built on core values of transparency, autonomy, hiring and retaining great people and always doing right by our customers.

Come roll with us.

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Our Teams

Eric Allen launched a bi-weekly Tech Talks series, where AdRoll engineers have presented to the team about everything from Node.js to R to Machine Learning. Depending on the day, he can be found working in Python, Java, JavaScript, or Erlang.

Brian Troutwine integrated real-time instrumentation into the AdRoll bidding system and ramped up the monitoring of said system. He talks about monitoring and instrumentation of complex systems at conferences sometimes. Also, he sits on a stool instead of using a chair.

Mars Jullian built a JavaScript library to track user interaction events across AdRoll's subdomains. She also extended our custom Backbone views to capture how our client-facing dashboard is used. This data will be used to inform design decisions and analyze the adoption of new features.

Benoit Rostykus built a large-scale machine learning system ingesting billions of events and sparse features every hour. Using state-of-the-art research works on convex optimization and low-level programming tricks, the model is queried to price billions of ads every day.

Jyri Tuulos is experimenting with React and Flux to build new scalable reporting tools. Thanks to React's highly optimized rendering capabilities these tools can handle ~100MB of binary data in the browser with sub-second interactions.

Dan Zito prepared both our server-side and client-side code for i18n support using Babel and a custom JavaScript implementation for gettext.

Timothee Boucher added support for geotargeting campaigns in cities all around the world. He built the whole feature from the PostgreSQL migrations to lazy-loading Backbone collections.

Ville Tuulos built a backend for our internal analytics. With a combination of just-in-time compiled queries, densely encoded matrices, and lots of bit twiddling, we are able to query billions of rows per second.

Gabriel Reyla is a Pythonista who is not afraid to use cutting-edge tools to build the next AdRoll RESTful and HATEOAS compliant API.

Byron Young was voted most fashionable developer two years in a row. He also rearchitected our entire LiquidAds product from the ground up and is personally responsible for the programmatic crawling of tens of millions of individual product pages each day.

RTB

What is real-time bidding? Every display ad you see online is backed by a real-time digital auction between thousands of participants competing for the right to serve you that ad. AdRoll is integrated with hundreds of advertising exchanges including Google, Facebook, Yahoo! and AppNexus, rendering billions of advertising impressions each day. Our real-time bidding system receives billions of daily auction requests across these various exchanges, each returning within 100 milliseconds or less. At peak we receive some 400K requests per second, making intelligent, data-informed decisions in terms of what to bid and how often.

The engineering complexity inherent in maintaining an effective, highly-available, scalable, and performant real-time bidding system cannot be understated. Ours is written in Erlang, a language well-suited to this particular problem due to it’s emphasis on fault-tolerance and concurrency. Our data science-driven bidding algorithms enable us to yield highly performant advertising campaigns to our end customers. Our overall bid request volume continues to grow week over week, in relation with the growth of our business as a whole. There is no shortage of interesting engineering problems to deal with when managing a system with such massive scale and performance demands.

Data

Our data team synthesizes over 15TB of data per day using Kinesis, Storm, HBase, and Hadoop to create valuable customer insights delivered to each of our 25,000+ clients. With AdRoll's global reach, over seven billion impressions stream in daily from all over the world, making scalability and reliability key. The solutions we've developed not only drive our dashboard but also deliver accurate, instant data to our RTB infrastructure and our advanced analytical systems.

Data Science

With the incredible amount of data digested by AdRoll systems, we need robust analysis to distill it into actionable components that can drive our customer's campaigns and our own business intelligence. Our ever-growing data science team develops the algorithms to achieve this with advanced mathematics and publishes our methods. What's our next big project? A giant machine learning system that can run over half a petabyte of data with billions of features and spit out a predictive model that can easily fit within memory on our bidding systems.

Core

How do you keep a diverse set of teams all accessing giant common data stores running at optimum efficiency? With a core built on cutting edge Python technologies that moves rapidly to support new products and AdRoll's explosive growth. Our core engineers solve some of our most challenging scalability problems for both business and engineering teams, building our API, internal application prototypes, and all of our integrations with supply networks.

Front-end

Our front-end team is responsible for the most visible and widely-used element of AdRoll - a tremendously powerful, yet easily-accessible, dashboard for our clients. Built on the BackboneJS library and utilizing our publicly-available API, these developers turn concepts into products with remarkable speed, giving customers access to the most powerful and innovative features in the industry without needing a Ph.D. We pride ourselves on delivering the best-designed interface available and our team of talented designers makes sure the features look as great as they perform.

Culture

At AdRoll, we like to think we have a Goldilocks engineering team; it's just right. You won't find us stuffed away in a dark corner writing code and you won't see any 'brogrammers' amongst our ranks. We prefer the sense of perspective that comes from a diverse group of people and a healthy work-life balance. When we aren't busy making AdRoll a fantastic place, you'll likely find us tinkering with hardware projects, going on bike rides around the bay, playing some Street Fighter, and spending time with other Rollers.

Engineering Blog Talks on YouTube AdRoll on GitHub

See Open Positions