Principal Software Engineering Manager

About the Role ProRata.ai http://ProRata.ai is building the future of digital advertising for the AI era. Powered by patent-pending AI agent technology, ProRata Ads delivers highly contextual, prompt-driven advertising that understands both brand intent and content semantics in real time. Our platform powers innovative ad experiences across Gist.ai http://Gist.ai and a growing network of premium publishers. We are looking for a Principal Software Engineering Manager (Tech Lead) to play a foundational role in designing and scaling our ProRata Ads infrastructure. You will own critical components of the ad serving system, including low-latency ad decisioning, agentic backend workflows, robust reporting, and fraud detection. This is a high-impact, hands-on leadership position. You will blend deep technical architecture with team guidance, working closely with frontend, product, and business development teams to deliver a next-generation ad platform that is scalable, reliable, and truly AI-native. Key Responsibilities - Lead the design and development of our core ad serving infrastructure, ensuring high throughput, sub-100ms latency, and extreme reliability at scale. - Architect and build agentic backend systems powered by LLMs — enabling intelligent workflows for contextual ad placement, creative optimization, real-time brand safety, and dynamic decisioning. - Partner closely with the frontend team on campaign management, creative generation/optimization, and advertiser-facing tools. - Design and implement scalable reporting, analytics, and fraud detection systems to maintain ecosystem trust and performance transparency. - Drive technical strategy for cloud-native, distributed systems — making trade-offs around cost, latency, availability, and AI inference efficiency. - Mentor and grow a team of strong engineers; provide technical leadership, conduct code/design reviews, and help recruit top talent. - Collaborate cross-functionally with Product, Ads Engineering, and Business Development to translate business needs into robust, production-ready systems. - Contribute to our evolving technical roadmap, with emphasis on GenAI integration, prompt-based advertising, and seamless performance in AI surfaces. Qualifications - 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, with at least 3–5 years in a technical leadership or engineering manager role. - Extensive hands-on experience building or scaling ad serving systems for display, native, or search-based advertising (experience at SSPs, DSPs, or large ad platforms is highly valued). - Strong proficiency in at least one of: Python, Java, C++, Rust — with proven ability to write production-grade, high-performance code. - Deep experience designing large-scale distributed systems in cloud environments (AWS, GCP, or Azure), including high availability, low-latency architectures, and observability. - Solid understanding of GenAI/LLM concepts; experience with prompt engineering, agentic workflows, or GPU-based inference (CUDA/ROCm) is a strong plus. - Track record of delivering complex, high-impact systems end-to-end in fast-moving environments. - Excellent communication and collaboration skills — able to explain complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders. - Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent experience). Preferred Qualifications - Prior experience building advertising technology systems at scale. - Hands-on work with large language models, inference optimization, or agent-based architectures. - Startup experience — comfort operating with high ownership, evolving requirements, and limited resources. - Familiarity with programmatic advertising concepts (OpenRTB, real-time bidding, contextual targeting) and ad quality/fraud challenges. Compensation The compensation for this position is competitive and commensurate with experience including: - Base salary range: $220,000 - $260,000 - Equity parti