Engineering Manager: Go Backend

Engineering Manager: Go Backend

Assertive Yield is a fast-growing optimization platform empowering publishers and SSPs to drive more revenue through intelligent auction dynamics, traffic shaping, analytics, and real-time decisioning. 

About the Role

We're looking for an Engineering Manager in Europe to lead our core backend engineering team, which primarily develops in Go. Reporting to the VP of Technology and working in close partnership with the VP of Product, you'll own the team's structure and operational excellence, ensure technical direction supports product and business goals, and build the systems that keep the team aligned, accountable, and shipping. This is a people-first but execution-driven leadership position for someone who thrives in ambiguity, builds order without killing momentum, and knows how to get the best out of people in the process. This role is ideal for someone who has successfully brought structure and alignment to backend engineering teams with high autonomy.

How We Work

Our backend engineering team works closely with multiple product teams operating with a high degree of autonomy across a growing platform. As we continue to scale, aligning teams around shared goals, improving cross-team collaboration, and strengthening the connection between product and engineering are key priorities.

This role focuses on clarifying how we operate by defining effective ways of working, improving coordination across teams, and ensuring we can move quickly while staying aligned as a company.

Key Responsibilities

Strategy & Direction

• Define and execute the engineering strategy, ensuring alignment with product and business goals and enabling the team to deliver effectively at scale
• Partner with the VP Technology and VP Product to translate roadmap priorities into executable engineering plans
• Define and execute the technical strategy for our high-performance, low-latency backend services (Prebid Server, Yield Manager, data ingestion), ensuring scalability and reliability.

People & Org

• Lead, coach, and grow developers, fostering a culture of accountability, growth, and high performance
• Own org design across the team — headcount planning, team structure, hiring pipelines, and onboarding
• Hold team members  accountable for outcomes, addressing underperformance directly and effectively when needed

Systems & Operations

• Design and continuously improve the systems, processes, and rituals that keep the team aligned, unblocked, and consistently delivering
• Establish clear development KPIs and hold the team accountable for delivery, quality, and velocity metrics
• Identify and remove systemic blockers across products and developers  before they become bottlenecks
• Establish clear ownership and decision-making frameworks to ensure alignment and reduce friction

Technical Culture

• Drive a culture of technical excellence — code quality, system reliability, scalable architecture, and sound engineering practices
• Build and maintain relationships with key external partners, vendors, and the broader engineering community
• Ensure adoption of modern Go best practices, focusing on performance, concurrency patterns, and microservices architecture
• Oversee key infrastructure and migration efforts (e.g., Kubernetes, ClickHouse backups), collaborating with engineers to mitigate single points of failure and production risks.
  

What We're Looking For

• 3+ years of professional experience writing production-grade code in Go (Golang).
• Demonstrated technical credibility in building and maintaining high-performance, low-latency distributed systems.
• 10+ years in software engineering, with 4+ years leading engineering managers or senior technical leaders
• Technically credible and able to earn trust with senior engineers
• Strong systems thinker — you design processes, team structures, and feedback loops that outlast you
• Demonstrated ability to build and retain high-performing engineering teams across distributed or remote environments
• Experience setting technical strategy for a core platform component, such as a high-volume ad server or data ingestion pipeline.
• Comfortable operating in ambiguity and making structural decisions with incomplete information
• Strong communicator who can bridge the gap between engineering depth and executive-level conversations
• Background in adtech, martech, or data-intensive platform environments is a strong plus
• Located in Europe
• This is a B2B contract engagement. Candidates must be able to invoice as an independent contractor or through their own legal entity.

Nice to Have

• Familiarity with programmatic advertising, ad serving infrastructure, or real-time bidding systems
• Background working with data science or ML teams embedded within an engineering org
• Experience building or overhauling engineering hiring and leveling frameworks
• Prior exposure to privacy-first infrastructure or compliance-heavy technical environments

What We Offer

• Innovative and dynamic environment
• Opportunities to grow
• Fully remote, full-time, and flexible working hours
• A fun, smart, and diverse team
• Competitive compensation package