Director of Engineering

About Acast

Since 2014, Acast has been building the world’s most valuable podcast marketplace, creating the technology that connects podcast creators, advertisers, and listeners. Its marketplace spans more than 140,000 podcasts, 3,300 advertisers, and one billion quarterly listens. Crucially, those listens are monetized wherever they happen—across any podcast app or listening platform.

About the role

We are seeking a Director of Engineering to lead the core Marketplace Products domain. This is a critical leadership position responsible for the technical platform that powers some of Acast’s primary revenue streams. Your mandate is to lead our teams in building a resilient, scalable, and innovative ad tech platform that can meet the company's multi-year global growth ambitions, ensuring both creators and advertisers experience world-class technology. You will lead Engineering Managers and Staff Engineers, setting the technical vision for all commercial systems.

What you´ll do

People Leadership and Organizational Scaling Lead Leaders: Serve as the people manager for Engineering Managers and Staff Engineers. Organizational Design: In partnership with the Director of Product, facilitate the process to co-design the org structure to maximize delivery efficiency, scalability, and foster deep alignment with Commercial and Product teams. Talent Development: Drive career paths, coaching, and succession planning. Ensure EMs are empowered to manage technical excellence and maintain a high-performing, psychologically safe engineering culture. Hiring and Capacity: Own the long-term headcount planning and budget, leading recruitment efforts for strategic, specialized ad tech and platform engineering talent. Technical Strategy and Architectural Ownership Long-Term Vision: Define and drive the technical roadmap 18 months ahead, ensuring the ad tech platform and monetization infrastructure can scale reliably to support exponential listenership and revenue growth, including different ad formats (e.g., video, programmatic). Architectural Accountability: Own the end-to-end architecture, focusing on resilience, speed, and real-time data processing. Risk and Investment: Advocate for strategic technical investments in core systems and platform components, clearly articulating the ROI of platform health, security, and technical debt mitigation to Executive Leadership. Cross-Functional and Commercial Alignment Commercial Partnership: Act as the senior technical counterpart to leadership in Sales, Content, Finance, and Legal/Compliance, translating business needs into robust, scalable engineering solutions. Execution Oversight: Ensure consistent execution velocity, high reliability, and rapid incident response across all critical revenue-driving systems. Feasibility and Innovation: Partner with Product and Design to explore technical feasibility and opportunities inherent in new ad-tech innovation and creator tools. Who you are

The Scaling Leader: You are an experienced engineering leader who thrives at the intersection of Ad Tech, large-scale data systems, and commercial strategy. Organizational Architect: Proven experience leading and coaching Engineering Managers and Staff Engineers, with a track record of scaling organizations and defining clear, efficient team structures. Ad Tech and Distributed Systems Acumen: Deep conceptual understanding of high-scale distributed systems and experience in domains like Ad Serving, programmatic bidding, real-time data pipelines, or high-volume E-commerce/Marketplace platforms. Architectural Judgment: Strong understanding of system design trade-offs at an organizational level (e.g., building platforms vs. specialized applications) and a history of driving technical strategy that maximizes business predictability and stability. Communication & Influence: Exceptional ability to communicate technical strategy and complexity across highly varied stakeholders—from technical ICs and EMs to Commercial Directors and the VP Product. Technical Foundation Strategic Technical Leadership: You possess the technical depth and credibility to coach managers and engineers on complex architectural decisions. You have a proven background in designing and operating highly scalable distributed systems and can effectively articulate the rationale behind strategic technical trade-offs (speed, cost, quality). Broad System Knowledge: A broad understanding of modern software development practices, various technology stacks, data architecture, and infrastructure.

Qualifications

7+ years of progressive experience in Engineering leadership roles (Senior EM or DoE level). Prior experience leading teams responsible for complex, Ad tech or e-commerce platforms. Bachelor’s degree in a relevant field or equivalent experience (e.g., Computer Science). Experience with cloud-native microservices architecture and data-driven decision-making.

Culture Acast is committed to creating a diverse environment and is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, national origin or any of the other wonderful characteristics that make us different. Culture is our number one priority as a business. We believe people come first, and we work every day to enable autonomy, continuous improvement and bring out the best in people. We’re global and have remote teams, so it’s even more important that we strive for an open, inclusive and caring environment where everyone feels visible and welcome. We consider ourselves a modern organization driven by strong values to create the best, most fulfilling and nurturing culture. We very much look forward to finding the next great person to join our cause!