Smartly
What's It Like to Work at Smartly?
Frequently Asked Questions
Smartly supports employee job satisfaction through a culture of high ownership and autonomy, transparent growth, global collaboration, and meaningful flexibility.
- Ownership and global impact: Smartly empowers employees to Own the Outcome by giving them autonomy, clear accountability, and room to take on meaningful responsibilities. This helps employees see how their work contributes to measurable business results.
- Career Growth and Internal Mobility: Smartly supports transparent growth through leadership coaching, subject matter expert programs, AI literacy development, and internal mobility, with a goal of filling 33% of open roles with internal talent.
- Meaningful global impact: Employees contribute to a platform that powers over $6B in annual ad spend and generates 300B+ creatives annually across major platforms such as Meta, Google, and TikTok, creating a clear connection between daily work and customer impact.
- Collaboration and scalable innovation: Smartly encourages teams to "Scale by Design" and work across functions to build repeatable solutions. A strong engineering culture supports technical excellence, hands-on AI and automation, and scalable platform innovation that helps the company grow effectively.
- Flexibility and belonging: Smartly demonstrates Earn Trust through hybrid work, a 30/60-day work-from-abroad policy, comprehensive healthcare, mental health resources, wellness programs, and generous time off (PTO). The company also fosters belonging through employee resource groups and leadership ask-me-anything sessions, helping employees feel heard, supported, and included.
Smartly is viewed as a strong place to work for ambitious employees who value structured growth, ownership, and a highly inclusive international culture.
- Strong ownership culture: Employees are trusted with meaningful responsibility early in their tenure. Smartlies quickly gain ownership of visible projects, solving real business problems, and shaping their own career paths with support from leaders and teammates.
- Career growth opportunities: Employees frequently emphasize internal mobility, transparent promotion criteria and development through mentorship, cross-functional work, certifications, and internal mobility programs.
- Collaborative and supportive teams: Current employees emphasize a welcoming atmosphere and approachable leadership, including CEO and a predominantly female leadership team. The environment encourages direct feedback and transparent communication through regular "Ask Me Anything" sessions and employee resource groups.
- Innovation-focused environment: Smartly brings together strong engineering, AI expertise, and customer insight to build long-term solutions at scale. Teams work cross-functionally from idea to production, ensuring innovation is grounded in real customer needs and creates measurable impact for global advertisers.
- Strong benefits and flexibility: Employees benefit from a hybrid work model that includes 30/60 day "work-from-anywhere" policies and international office rotations. Employees receive flexible and unlimited PTO, wellness programs, 5-Year Anniversary Sabbatical Program, volunteer opportunities, parental leave.
In 2026, BuiltIn recognized Smartly as one of the “Best Places to Work” and “Best Midsize Places to Work”.
- Known for Technical excellence at scale: Smartly is well known for building its enterprise-scale AI and advertising technology and was recognized as a "Leader" in The Forrester Wave™: Creative Advertising Technologies, Q4 2024, which highlighted its ability to strategically unify media and creative workflows. Additionally, the platform is a finalist for industry accolades like the Mumbrella Awards and B&T Awards for Marketing Technology Company of the Year.
- Global and Collaborative Workplace: Smartly is a truly multinational team of over 873 employees representing over 64 nationalities. With 30 locations across 21 countries, the company is known for strong international collaboration across autonomous teams and diverse regions.
- Innovation-focused, fast-paced culture: Smartly's reputation is closely tied to the Smartly's values, which emphasizes autonomy, candor communication, long-term thinking, and teamwork over ego. At Smartly, "nothing is someone else’s problem"—employees are empowered to act with an entrepreneurial attitude to drive the company's long-term success.
- Commitment to employee growth and inclusion: Current employees highlight supportive managers, mentorship, cross-functional learning, and inclusive communities.
Working at Smartly means operating in a high-performance environment shaped by fast-moving advertising, AI, and constant product evolution.
One key tradeoff is ownership vs. highly structured guidance: Smartly expects employees to Own the Outcome by taking accountability for both work and results. This suits proactive people who can move work forward without waiting for every detail to be defined.
Employees may also experience scale vs. fixed processes. Through Scale by Design, teams are encouraged to improve systems, simplify workflows, and build solutions that support future growth. This can be exciting, but priorities may evolve as the business and customer needs change. Smartly also values Start with the Client means work is connected to real customer needs and measurable outcomes.
Finally, Smartly emphasizes a strong in-person office culture vs. fully remote flexibility, emphasizing 3 days in office for most roles. This environment suits people who value flexibility while still seeing the importance of communication, reliability, and shared team momentum.
Great match for candidates who prefer:
- High ownership and accountability
- Customer-focused work with measurable impact
- Cross-functional collaboration
- Building scalable systems, processes, and products
- Trust, transparency, and continuous improvement
Working here means:
- Taking ownership of meaningful work
- Moving with purpose as priorities evolve
- Collaborating across teams and functions
- Operating with high standards and visibility
- Thinking beyond your own role to create broader
Smartly's Candidate Tradeoffs
If you’re weighing whether Smartly is the right fit, these are the core tradeoffs to consider.
- Smartly emphasizes managers developed through formal training to ensure consistency and strong leadership fundamentals, though that approach prioritizes standardized management practices over highly individualized styles.
Smartly Employee Perspectives
The work of a data and analytics team is critical to a business’s success. Just ask Frederic Calvez, Senior Director of Production and Operations at Smartly, an AI-powered advertising technology company. At Smartly, data is very rarely “just data.”
According to Calvez, every product decision, customer insight or AI capability presents a data problem that his team needs to solve, urging them to consider how data is collected, moved, modeled, governed and made available for employees across the company.
“That creates an interesting combination of deep technical challenges and very practical ones,” Calvez said.
"You often hear that engineers have to choose between two career paths — either you are responsible for the technology or the people building the technology. You know, the tech expert track versus the manager track. But it doesn't have to be either-or," Mikko says. "You can alternate between the two and apply learnings from both roles to become a better professional."
What’s it like to work on the data and analytics team at Smartly?
What I enjoy about working in the data platform at Smartly is that data is very rarely “just data.” We operate an AI-powered advertising platform where media, creative and intelligence come together, so behind almost every product decision, customer insight or AI capability, there is a data problem to solve.
My team sits at the foundation of a lot of that. We think about how data is collected, moved, modeled, governed and made available so that people across Smartly can actually trust and use it. That creates an interesting combination of deep technical challenges and very practical ones. You can spend part of your time thinking about architecture and scalability, and the next part talking with another engineering, product or business team about what is getting in their way.
I like that balance. We aren’t building a data platform for the sake of having a data platform. We’re building it for people to use.
What makes data work at Smartly meaningful or satisfying?
For me, it’s the leverage. Some of the most satisfying work in a platform team happens when you solve something once and suddenly make dozens or hundreds of other decisions easier. If we improve the reliability of a critical dataset, reduce the effort required to discover the right data or give teams a better way to build and operate their own data products, the impact compounds.
I also find it meaningful that the problems aren’t purely technical. A perfectly engineered data platform that nobody trusts or understands isn’t particularly useful. You have to understand how people work, where the friction is, and what problem you’re actually trying to solve.
That forces us to think beyond pipelines and infrastructure. We’re constantly asking: How do we make the right thing the easy thing? How do we give teams autonomy without creating chaos? How do we make data trustworthy without turning governance into bureaucracy? Those are difficult problems, but that’s exactly what makes them interesting.
What should candidates know about the impact data professionals can have on your business?
The impact can be much broader than their immediate area of ownership. Smartly works with hundreds of brands and advertisers, and our platform brings together media, creative and intelligence across the advertising ecosystem. Data is what connects many of those pieces. Improving how we work with it can influence everything from engineering productivity and product development to analytics, AI and ultimately the value we deliver to customers.
That’s why I think the strongest data professionals here aren’t satisfied with receiving a requirement and implementing it. They’re curious enough to ask why the requirement exists in the first place.
Some of the most valuable questions are surprisingly simple: Who is going to use this? What decision are they trying to make? What happens when the data is wrong? Can another team solve the next problem themselves because of what we're building today?
That mindset can turn a relatively small technical improvement into something with companywide impact. And that’s probably what I find most rewarding about the data platform at Smartly: Our best work often isn’t the work people notice. It’s the work that makes everyone else’s work possible.
Smartly Employee Reviews
What People Are Saying About Smartly
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Team Support: Colleagues are often seen as smart, helpful, and internationally diverse, with frequent cross-functional collaboration. The people are praised even when leadership or company decisions draw criticism.
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Benefits & Perks: Benefits are considered robust, including generous paid time off, wellness and mental-health resources, parental leave, and hybrid flexibility. Some locations and roles also mention work-from-abroad options and sabbaticals.
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Autonomy: Work is described as high-ownership with low micromanagement, enabling meaningful responsibility early. Employees are encouraged to make decisions, propose ideas, and tie outcomes to customer and business results.
Smartly's Awards
Smartly's Benefits
Established employee awards to honor work and contributions
Quarterly engagement surveys to gauge employee satisfaction
Documented career progression frameworks
Documented internal promotion policy
Documented path to leadership development
Encourages lateral mobility to expand skills and impact
Posts new positions internally and encourages employees to apply
Prioritizes promotion advancement based on impact
Prioritizes promotion advancement based on long-term contribution
Promote from within
Provides customized development tracks
Regularly scheduled promotion review cycles for employees
Engineering team utilizes pair programming
Hosts in-person all-hands meetings
In person and virtual options
Hosts in-person revenue kickoff meetings
Implements team-based strategic planning
Open office floor plan to encourage communication and collaboration
Uses an OKR operational model to clearly define goals and priorities
Utilizes an open door policy that encourages accessibility
Offers a remote work program
Utilizes a flexible work schedule
Utilizes a hybrid work model
