VP, Engineering

Upwave: The Analytics Platform for Brand Advertising.

Upwave is the leading analytics software platform giving brands, agencies, and media partners a unified, cross-media solution to measure brand advertising. Providing a deterministic, real-time view of brand advertising investment, Upwave's automated platform allows advertisers to optimize TV, CTV, digital, social and cross-channel campaigns towards audience accuracy and reach, brand lift, and person's lifted– with campaign-level and portfolio views.

Our customers are Fortune 500 companies across multiple verticals - including CPG, food & beverage, consumer technology & telecom, and financial services - as well as the world's largest advertising agencies and media platforms and publishers.

We are unapologetically supportive of brand advertising, and work hard every day to prove its value; we know if companies can measure the value of those dollars, they'll spend more. Brand advertising pays for not only the movies we watch and music we hear, but the journalism we read and the information we access. In short, brand advertising supports the free flow of information through society. So, we're proud to be the first company dedicated to using data science to show the true effectiveness of brand advertising.

We are backed by leading venture investors (Y Combinator, Uncork Capital, Bloomberg Beta, Initialized Capital, PivotNorth, Ridge Ventures, Industry Ventures, Conductive Ventures,) and leading MarTech founders & CEOs.

We're a humble but ambitious team that takes its work seriously but never ourselves. Come join us.

As our VP of Engineering, you will:

• Lead our entire software engineering team and development process, overseeing our codebase, cloud infrastructure, and our talented team of cross-functional engineers.
• Partner closely with our CTO and product leadership to refine the product roadmap and bring it to life.
• Set a high bar for engineering excellence and craftsmanship. Help the team reach it through thoughtful coaching, mentorship, code/design reviews, and strategic technical guidance (while empowering them to drive the day-to-day execution).
• Inspire the team to do their best work and grow their skills through hands-on career development, intentional challenges, clear expectations, and recognition. Lead with empathy and emotional intelligence to bring out the best in people and rally them around a shared mission.
• Drive continuous improvement of our software development lifecycle and engineering processes to optimize our velocity, quality and team health and happiness. Set a good example and sweat the details. Explore creative ways to use Generative AI to make our development both faster and more fun.
• Over time, grow our team by recruiting a diverse set of exceptional talented engineers.
• Act as a cultural steward, and set a consistently positive example of healthy, effective, inclusive Upwaver behavior.

About you:

• You are a seasoned leader with a track record of managing high-performing teams to deliver valuable, production-grade SaaS and/or enterprise software at scale.
• You are curious and pragmatic technologist who enjoys digging into complex systems to understand them at both a high level and deep in the details. You believe 'there is no substitute for understanding' and you are able to and interested in deeply understanding the work your team is doing. You have a commitment to lifelong learning and keep your skills and knowledge up to date.
• You are a systems thinker who has the awareness and finesse to drive change in human organizations while caring for the individuals involved.
• You are an excellent communicator. You know that what matters is what they heard, not what you said. So you figure out and do what's necessary to connect with each person as an individual. You understand that alignment requires constant maintenance and investment, and you put in the work to align stakeholders and your team. You practice compassionate, empathetic, effective, and non-violent communication.
• You're humble. You understand you're here to make the team successful, not to tell people what to do. You surface and support the right ideas, even if those ideas aren't yours.
• You are looking for a startup environment and are ready to demonstrate an ownership mentality. Upwave moves fast, and you will need to be excited and energized to help us move faster. You will have the support you need, but you should expect and embrace a steep learning curve leading to high autonomy and rapid career growth. We value and provide a sustainable work life balance, but as the leader of our engineering organization you will need to work hard (and sometimes long) when circumstances require.

Bonus Points:

• Strong command of architectural patterns and engineering practices for building cloud-native, data-intensive applications.
• Familiarity with modern web stacks such as React on the frontend, JVM languages like Java, Kotlin, or Groovy on the backend, and Python for AI/ML.
• Exposure to adtech/martech ecosystem, marketing measurement approaches (e.g. media mix modeling, attribution), and analytical methods like causal inference and ML.

Why you'll love working at Upwave:

• Upwavers treat each other well. We screen for people who are unusually caring, and who want to collaborate and know how to do so effectively and compassionately.
• You'll ship an elegant, intuitive product powered by a fascinating backend platform that processes billions of ad events and powers statistical learning models to drive smarter decisions.
• Work with modern tech like cloud data pipelines, in-production generative AI, and causal ML to solve cutting-edge problems at the intersection of adtech, data science and SaaS.
• We're 'post product market fit', meaning that we're far enough along in our journey to know that we're building something real users find valuable enough to pay (handsomely) for. But we're playing in a huge market, and we're early enough along that each individual engineer and engineering leader can still have a pivotal impact on our product and on the overall trajectory and success of our business.
• We're profitable. We're still looking to grow fast, but being profitable gives us the security to invest in growing sustainably.
• Be part of an engineering-first culture that values efficiency and life-work harmony over sheer hours spent in the codebase.
• Enjoy the flexibility and diversity of a fully remote (but time-zone aligned) team spanning multiple countries and continents.
• Earn a competitive compensation package with strong equity upside in a growing startup.

Additional Information:

The annual base salary range for this role is $190,000 to $247,000 + equity + benefits. Our salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location. The range displayed on each job posting reflects the minimum and maximum target for the new hire salaries for the position across all US locations. Within the range, individual pay is determined by work location and additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for your preferred location during the hiring process. Please note that the compensation details listed in US role postings reflect the base salary only, and do not include bonus, equity, or benefits.

Upwave is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.