Principal Engineer

Kevel is transforming the retail media space with its cutting-edge, AI-driven ad tech infrastructure APIs that power the Retail Media Cloud™. This groundbreaking solution combines the power of AI insights with API-based technology, allowing multi-brand retailers to build dynamic, customizable ad platforms while maintaining full control of their first-party data. With Kevel, retailers can deliver personalized shopper experiences, optimize ad targeting, and unlock predictive insights to stay ahead in an ever-evolving market.

JOB OVERVIEW: The Delivery team is responsible for enhancements and maintenance of the core of Kevel’s main revenue stream - ad serving. These high-throughput systems operate globally with strict latency and availability requirements. This engineer will work with the team on modernizing the systems, improving reliability and robustness, while developing new features to gain new customers.

LOCATION: REMOTE - HUNGARY, PORTUGAL OR SPAIN. This position is 100% remote. Applicants located anywhere within Hungary, Portugal or Spain are encouraged to apply. Applicants must be legally eligible to work within one of these countries.

PAY TRANSPARENCY: Kevel uses external, third-party market data to determine compensation for all open positions. Our compensation philosophy is based on the candidate’s specific working location and experience level. This means that we will take a no negotiation approach in our recruitment and offer processes. We believe this is an important step in living our value of embracing diversity while underlining our commitment to fair, equitable and inclusive pay practices.

All compensation packages include the additional benefits as described in the 'Why you'll love working with us' section below. We also have a transparent ‘Total Rewards Philosophy’ we’d be happy to share with you which describes our overall approach to compensation and benefits in full detail! Our recruitment team can share more about this with you in an initial phone interview and will be happy to answer any questions you have related to compensation at Kevel! 

WHAT YOU'LL ACCOMPLISH:

• Evolve the ad decision pipeline, including balancing and pacing, indexing, filtering, selection, and budgeting.
• Improve the platform's architectural qualities, helping ensure our foundation provides the scalability, reliability, security, and performance our global customers require.
• Work closely with the product management team to help design and build new features.
• Help provide operational oversight for the platform, making sure we are up and running 24/7.
• Work closely with our customer success teams to deliver value and drive growth.

SKILLS YOU'LL BRING WITH YOU:

Required:

• Experience building and operating distributed systems in a cloud environment.
• Strong programming experience in at least one production backend language, ideally Clojure, Rust, Node.js, Java, Kotlin, Scala, or another JVM language.
• Experience designing or maintaining latency-sensitive systems with tight response-time requirements.
• Experience with HTTP-based APIs and production service integrations.
• Experience working with databases, including transactional data models.
• Comfortable participating in an on-call rotation with clear escalation paths.

Preferred:

• Strong AWS and/or GCP experience across compute, storage, messaging, networking, and IAM.
• Experience with infrastructure as code, such as AWS CDK, CDKTF, Terraform, or similar tools.
• Experience with event streaming or stream processing systems.
• Experience with observability platforms, including metrics, logs, alerts, tracing, and infrastructure monitoring.
• Experience improving testability and reducing feedback cycle times through unit, integration, simulation, or load testing.
• Experience refactoring existing distributed systems without changing external behavior.
• Experience working on high-throughput systems with sub-100ms response budgets.

Nice To Have:

• Experience with ad serving, auctions, pacing, budgeting, targeting, or real-time decisioning systems.
• Experience with functional programming or Clojure specifically.
• Experience modernizing legacy systems while keeping production systems highly available.
• Experience supporting globally distributed, multi-region services.
• Experience working closely with product and customer-facing teams on technical product features.

*For a glimpse into some of the technical problems this team works on, you can watch Tim Ewald’s Clojure/conj presentation!

WHY YOU'LL LOVE WORKING WITH US:

• Fully Remote Team: We are a 100% remote work environment with employees located around the world. You are welcome to work from home, one of our offices, a WeWork office, or an equivalent co-working space.
• Flexible Working Hours: We understand our employees have their own lives, responsibilities and working preferences. We trust our employees to communicate with their managers, and work when they work best.
• Comprehensive Health Benefits - Kevel provides 100% employer paid medical benefits for our employees and their children, plus comprehensive, affordable coverage for all other dependents.
• Savings opportunity for the Future: Kevel offers retirement savings plans with employer contributions so employees can save toward future financial objectives. 
• Rest and Relaxation: Unlimited personal time off - and we mean it! We trust our employees to take the time they need, whenever they need it. We also offer Paid Holidays + a Kevel Holiday Break (from 12/24 - 1/1 every year!)
• Kevelfest: Our annual corporate retreat! The entire Kevel team gets together once a year for a four - day in - person event filled with collaboration, team building, celebration and fun! 
• Home Office Stipend: You’ll receive a new windows or mac machine (your choice) + a $500 home office allowance to purchase what you need to set up your work space properly!
• Parental Leave Support: We support all parents with salary continuation and benefits when our employees are growing their families.
• Free press benefits: Kevel believes all employees should have access to legitimate news sources. You’ll receive a $300 annual allowance to subscribe to the news source of your choice.
• You’ll work with an award winning team! We’ve won numerous Best Places to Work Awards for several years and counting! We’ve also won many awards for our Innovation, Business Intelligence, and our best-in-class products (Software of the Year, Cloud Company of the Year, Best Ad Tech and API Innovator). 
• Full transparency. We embrace transparency and encourage you to read more about what we value through our Company Constitution and Employee Bill of Rights, our About Kevel page, and Careers Page.

Hiring Guidelines by Country: Kevel hires new team members in countries around the world. Some roles may carry specific location-based eligibility requirements. Our Recruitment Team will share the specific benefits that are available in your location, and can help answer any questions about location specific eligibility requirements and benefits after the recruitment process begins.

ABOUT KEVEL 

Kevel (previously Adzerk) offers the infrastructure APIs needed to quickly build custom ad platforms for sponsored listings, internal promotions, native ads, and more. We are committed to helping publishers drive new revenue and take back the Internet from ad tech giants like Google, Amazon, and Facebook. Kevel was founded in 2010 in Durham, North Carolina. We embrace remote working culture with our entire team being spread across the United States, United Kingdom, Portugal and Singapore! Kevel is proud to be an inclusive workplace with one goal in common — we want to make the internet a better place. 

ALL APPLICANTS ARE WELCOME, EXACTLY AS YOU ARE

We’re building a global community - one that’s safe for people of all backgrounds and walks of life. Our policies and way of working are guided by our core values of inclusivity, trust, empathy, and respect. We know we have more work to do, but firmly believe that our work is at its best when everyone feels free to be their most authentic selves. Kevel is an equal opportunity employer, and we’re proud of our ongoing efforts and commitment to creating a diverse, inclusive, and transparent workplace where everyone feels respected, heard, safe and accepted. At Kevel, we embrace our differences and consider diversity a superpower that drives the success of our organization. Individuals seeking employment at Kevel are considered without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, marital status, medical condition, ancestry, disability, military or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.