Lead Developer - Identity and Audience

Job description

ABOUT VIBE At Vibe.co http://Vibe.co, we're reimagining how brands reach audiences in the age of streaming. We believe streaming TV is no longer just a brand awareness play, it's the next great performance marketing channel. We're building the infrastructure to unlock this $100B opportunity. Vibe.co http://Vibe.co provides an Audience First Streaming TV Advertising solution for marketers to unlock TV as a growth channel. Our all-in-one solution combines hyper-targeted audience segmentation, AI-powered insights and recommendations, real-time campaign optimization, and incrementality measurement, giving brands of all sizes the precision and transparency they've come to expect from social and search, but on TV. Trusted by over 10,000 brands, Vibe.co http://Vibe.co reaches more than 120 million households across 500+ apps and channels, delivering an average 250% return on ad spend and 20% sales lift. The company hit a $100 million revenue run rate in under two years, ranking among the ten fastest software companies to reach that milestone. Vibe.co http://Vibe.co's investors include Hedosophia (an early backer of Spotify, Uber, and Airbnb), Elaia, Singular, QuantumLight (Revolut CEO Nik Storonsky's fund), and Illusian (Supercell CEO Ilkka Paananen's fund), as well as angel investors including Carolyn Everson, board member of The Walt Disney Company and Coca-Cola. Nirav Tolia, CEO of Nextdoor, sits on the company's board of directors. Founded in 2022, Vibe.co http://Vibe.co is widely recognized as the category-defining platform in streaming TV advertising, bringing the power of Meta and Google-style performance marketing to the fastest-growing segment in media. ABOUT THE ROLE Data isn't a support function at Vibe — it's the fuel behind every decision the platform makes, from which ad to show to how we measure its impact. You'll join the Data Platform team and lead the Identity squad, the group responsible for attaching every event Vibe observes to a real identity: the foundation for targeting, measurement, and the training data our models learn from. This is a player-coach role on a small, high-leverage team — you, a staff software engineer, and an ML engineer — and it exists because identity resolution at Vibe's scale has outgrown ad hoc ownership and needs someone who can both push the algorithms forward and set the technical direction. You'd want this job because you'll own one of the hardest, most consequential problems in the stack end to end; because you'll stay hands-on with clustering and entity resolution at real US scale rather than managing from a distance; and because you'll shape how identity evolves as the industry moves toward a privacy-first world. WHAT YOU'LL DO Technical Leadership - Set the technical direction and roadmap for Vibe's identity stack end to end - Design and build clustering algorithms and pipelines that resolve identity at US scale - Make architecture decisions that scale economically and quantify their impact - Anticipate scaling pain before it turns into an incident - Drive systematic improvements to identity resolution accuracy Reliability, Scale & Cost - Build observability into identity pipelines with meaningful alerts and healthy SLOs - Profile and optimize compute and storage across Dagster, Spark, and Iceberg - Treat infrastructure spend as a first-class engineering concern Expanding the Stack - Extend identity capabilities into richer audience construction and attribution - Build platform-level tooling so every team can resolve identity behind their events - Design identity approaches built for a privacy-first future People & Partnership - Lead the squad's senior engineer through 1:1s, feedback, and career development - Represent identity in cross-team Data Platform roadmap decisions - Translate ambiguous stakeholder requests into concrete technical deliverables - Push back on requests where the right call is "not yet" or "not this way" WHAT YOU NEED - 8+ years building and operating production ML or data systems, including leading technical work as a tech lead, staff engineer, or team lead - Hands-on experience with large-scale entity resolution, clustering, or graph problems, with the ability to own and challenge the algorithms themselves - Strong distributed-systems foundations across a modern orchestrator (e.g. Dagster), distributed compute (e.g. Spark), and large-scale storage (e.g. Iceberg) - A track record of building evaluation frameworks and using them to drive measurable algorithmic improvements - Experience managing performance and cost at genuinely large data scale - Strong cross-functional communication, with the ability to adjust detail level by audience and align stakeholders with conflicting priorities NICE TO HAVES - Experience in streaming TV advertising or programmatic advertising OUR VALUES At Vibe, we run on three values: Impact, Ambition, and Urgency. We tie every goal to a real business outcome, think 10x rather than settling for good enough, and move daily rather than waiting for perfect conditions. You'll thrive here if you own outcomes without needing direction, default to action, and hold yourself to results, not effort. This is a high-performance environment with high-performance rewards: you'll work alongside people who push you, with real ownership over hard problems in a market that's moving fast. If that sounds like the best version of your career, we want to meet you. WHAT WE OFFER Pour les candidats basés en France, la rémunération est déterminée en fonction du marché local. Chez Vibe, nous voulons que vous construisiez quelque chose, possédiez quelque chose, et progressiez vite. Voici comment nous le prouvons : - Variable pay — based on objectives you hit. No arbitrary targets. - Hybrid flexibility — We're in the Heart of Paris and our team is in 3x a week! - Health insurance — Full coverage via Alan. - Meal vouchers — Via Swile. - Annual offsite — The whole team, once a year, somewhere worth the trip. - Tech Syncs — Engineering and Product meet in person at least quarterly, worldwide. OUR INTERVIEW PROCESS - We respect your time. Here's exactly what to expect — no surprises, no ghosting. - Recruiter screen — 30 min. We'll share context; you'll share yours. - Manager interview — Meet the person you'd work with directly. - Take-home assignment + live debrief — A real problem, not a trick. We'll work through it together. - Calibration interview — A senior leader joins to ensure we're holding a consistent, high bar. - Offer — Fast. We don't let good decisions sit. - Reference checks — Two calls, handled with discretion. EQUAL OPPORTUNITY Vibe is an equal opportunity employer. We evaluate all applicants without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. We believe the best ideas come from teams with different backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences. If you need a reasonable accommodation during the application or interview process, please let us know. Referral Instructions Being referred? Ask your contact to submit your application directly on your behalf.