The Economist Group - Distinguished Engineer - Web & Advertisement
Requirements
• Web engineering at scale: Substantial experience designing and running high-traffic, customer-facing web products, with extensive experience in engineering and a significant part of it as a senior technical authority. Media, publishing or other ad-funded and subscription-funded context strongly preferred. • Web engineering at scale: • Modern web stack mastery: Expert, hands-on command of React, Next.js, Node.js and TypeScript, and of rendering strategies (SSR, SSG, ISR, edge), CDN and caching, CI/CD and testing. • Modern web stack mastery: • Mobile web performance: Deep expertise in Core Web Vitals, rendering performance, device and network constraints, and in keeping a fast site fast while carrying advertising and third-party code. • Mobile web performance: • Advertising technology: Strong working knowledge of the publisher-side ad stack: ad servers, header bidding and programmatic supply chains, ad formats and delivery, viewability and measurement, and how they affect page performance and revenue. • Advertising technology: • Consent, privacy and identity: Practical experience of consent management, privacy regulation (GDPR, CCPA), and privacy-preserving identity, targeting and measurement in a changing cookie landscape. • Consent, privacy and identity: • Leading large-scale change without line authority: Evidence of setting direction across multiple teams and leading complex, multi-year migrations or re-platforming through influence, written argument and technical credibility. • Leading large-scale change without line authority: • Hands-on credibility: Still writes and reviews production code, and can go deep on design, debugging and performance alongside senior engineers. • Hands-on credibility: • Commercial fluency: Understands how a publisher earns from both subscriptions and advertising, and can build and defend investment cases with product, advertising and finance leaders. • Commercial fluency: • Communication: Exceptional written and verbal communication; able to make trade-offs plain to engineers, commercial leaders and executives alike. • Communication: • Desirable • Technical SEO and GEO: Practical experience of organic discovery engineering, structured data, and how AI-driven answer engines change traffic and content strategy. • Technical SEO and GEO: • Experimentation at scale: Experience building and running a high-cadence A/B testing programme with credible statistical practice, across both reader and advertising outcomes. • Experimentation at scale: • Paywall and subscription integration: Familiarity with paywall, registration and entitlement flows, and with balancing them against advertising and SEO. • Paywall and subscription integration: • Design systems and accessibility: Experience owning a design system and meeting WCAG obligations across a large surface. • Design systems and accessibility: • Advertising data and products: Experience with first-party data platforms, contextual targeting, clean rooms or custom ad products and sponsored content formats. • Advertising data and products: • AI-enabled ways of working: Using AI tooling to improve engineering productivity and quality, or web and advertising outcomes such as personalisation, ad yield or content discovery. • AI-enabled ways of working: • Industry standing: Public contributions such as talks, writing, open source or standards work (for example W3C, IAB Tech Lab or Prebid) in web or advertising engineering. • Industry standing: • Attributes • Direct and evidence-led: makes the trade-off explicit, states the assumption, measures the result. • Leads through influence rather than hierarchy; is sought out by teams rather than imposed on them. • Credible with senior engineers and with commercial and editorial leaders in the same week. • Builds and simplifies: prefers fewer, faster, better systems and removes complexity and page weight rather than adding them. • Raises the standard of the people around them and multiplies the impact of every team they touch. • Working Arrangements • The majority of our roles operate on a hybrid working pattern, with 3+ days office attendance required. • AI usage for your application • We are an innovative organisation that encourages the use of technology. We recognise that candidates may utilise AI tools to support with their job application process. However, it is essential that all information you provide truthfully and accurately reflects your own experience, skills, and qualifications.
Responsibilities
• The role holds technical authority over the web platform and the advertising technology that runs on and alongside it: • Web platform and architecture: The economist.com stack, rendering strategy (SSR, SSG, ISR, edge), CDN and caching, the design system, and the shared front-end and back-end-for-front-end services used across the site. • Web platform and architecture: • Performance and quality: Mobile web performance, Core Web Vitals, accessibility, reliability, security and the technical health of everything shipped on economist.com, including third-party code. • Performance and quality: • Discovery: Technical SEO, structured data and generative engine optimisation (GEO), and how the platform responds to AI-driven answer engines and changing referral patterns. • Discovery: • Advertising technology: Ad serving and delivery, header bidding and programmatic integrations, direct-sold and sponsored formats, viewability, brand safety and ad-quality controls. • Advertising technology: • Consent, privacy and data: Consent management, privacy-compliant identity and targeting, first-party data and contextual signals, measurement and attribution, and compliance with GDPR, CCPA and the post-third-party-cookie landscape. • Consent, privacy and data: • Experimentation and observability: Feature flagging, A/B testing infrastructure, real-user monitoring and the instrumentation that measures both reader and advertising outcomes. • Experimentation and observability: • The role works across every team that builds on the web or touches advertising, with the Head of Product & Engineering, Web, Engineering Managers, Technical Leads, Advertising Sales and Operations, Marketing, Data, Security, Legal and Editorial as partners. It does not own a team or a roadmap; it owns the technical direction those roadmaps deliver against. • Accountabilities • Accountabilities • Set the web and advertising technical strategy: Define and maintain a single target architecture for the web platform and ad stack, and a sequenced, costed path from today’s estate to it, aligned to subscription and advertising strategy and agreed with domain leaders. • Set the web and advertising technical strategy: • Own the hardest technical decisions: Make or arbitrate the high-consequence calls on rendering and caching strategy, framework and platform choices, ad-tech vendor selection, build or buy, and how advertising and third-party code are loaded. Record them so they can be understood and challenged. • Own the hardest technical decisions: • Balance revenue and experience on the evidence: Turn the tension between ad yield and reader experience into explicit, measured trade-offs: set budgets for performance, layout stability and third-party weight, and design the architecture so both can improve together. • Balance revenue and experience on the evidence: • Lead from the code: Stay hands-on: design, prototype, write and review code on the critical paths, and lead directly on the most complex initiatives, such as rendering migrations, ad-stack re-platforming or a new consent and identity approach. • Lead from the code: • Guarantee performance, reliability and security: Set the standards for Core Web Vitals, availability, observability, supply-chain and third-party script security, and incident response, and lead technical response and root-cause analysis for major web and advertising incidents. • Guarantee performance, reliability and security: • Hold the line on privacy and compliance: Own the technical posture on consent, privacy regulation, accessibility (WCAG) and advertising standards, working with Legal, Data and Security. • Hold the line on privacy and compliance: • Raise the engineering bar: Mentor and develop Technical Leads and Staff and Principal Engineers; shape web engineering standards, review practice and hiring bars; and be a visible reason strong engineers join and stay. • Raise the engineering bar: • Connect technology to commercial outcomes: Translate architecture into business terms (subscription conversion, ad revenue and yield, viewability, organic traffic, cost to serve) and build the technical case for investment. • Connect technology to commercial outcomes: • Lead strategic technical partnerships: Hold the technical relationship with strategic web and ad-tech vendors and partners, including ad servers, supply-side platforms, consent providers and CDN providers, and influence their roadmaps where it matters to us. • Lead strategic technical partnerships:
Benefits
• Our benefits package is designed to support your wellbeing, growth, and work-life balance. It includes a highly competitive pension or 401(k) plan, private health insurance, and 24/7 access to counselling and wellbeing resources through our Employee Assistance Program. • We also offer a range of lifestyle benefits, including our Work From Anywhere program, which allows you to work from any location where you have the legal right to do so for up to 25 days per year. In addition, we provide generous annual and parental leave, as well as dedicated days off for volunteering and even for moving home. • You will also be given free access to all The Economist content, including an online subscription, our range of apps, podcasts and more.
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