Tech Lead, Ads

About Wego:

We’re on a mission to help people discover the real value of travel — to inspire, to give more reasons, to make it easy — for you to travel. Our company was founded back in 2005, and since then, we’ve imagined and created some of the most well-loved products for travelers all around the world.

Today, Wego is the number 1 travel metasearch engine in the Middle East. There are millions of users on Wego every month — people who travel for adventure, for work, for family and for many other reasons. That’s why we work tirelessly to make your experience of planning & booking flights, hotels and trips as seamless as possible

Summary:

In this Technical Lead role, you will lead and manage the engineering team responsible for Wego’s on-site advertising business (including search, recommendation and display) and advertiser-facing product solutions.

The Ads team’s mission is to deliver growth to our advertisers, and add value to the user journey on Wego.

Key responsibilities:

• Manage and coach a team of engineers, fostering a collaborative and high-performance culture.
• Drive the development and maintenance of our Ad delivery systems and Advertiser solutions, ensuring reliability, scalability, and performance.
• Collaborate effectively with product management and UX to solve our customers’ and advertisers’ problems.
• Collaborate with other engineering teams, where needed, to weave ads into Wego’s travel experience and to integrate systems.
  
  

Our ideal candidate will:

• Have substantial experience in the Ad Tech domain and ideally, in the e-commerce industry.
• Love bringing order to chaos and helping multiple stakeholders and engineers achieve a complex goal.
• Have experience helping shape product requirements into technical specifications ready for implementation by engineers.
• Be empathetic to both engineers and stakeholders, but a little more so to engineers.
• Demonstrate strong following-through and following-up skills.
• Value the importance of frequent, high-quality releases and short feedback loops.
• Focus on solving customer problems, not just fulfilling requirements.
  
  

Qualifications:

• 3+ years of experience in a technical leadership role, with demonstrated success in managing and developing engineering teams.
• 4+ years of experience in developing and running backend applications, with a bonus for experience in Go or Java. You are fluent, confident and know how to operate services in production.
• Have enough familiarity with web applications written in JavaScript, React, or similar web frameworks, to be comfortable contributing code changes in existing web applications.
• Production experience working with RDBMS, wide-column stores and key-value stores.
• Strong technical expertise in modern software development practices and technologies.
  
  

In the first month, you’ll:

• Get up to speed on our current initiatives and systems.
• Meet every contributor and understand what their areas of expertise are.
• Learn and understand deeply the mission, vision and strategy for the advertising business at Wego.
  
  

In the first three months, you'll:

• Comfortably making changes to on-site advertising.
• Starting to work with the product team on advertiser-facing product solutions.
• Play a key role in hiring more engineers to the team.
• Own the iteration planning process and be a strong influence on roadmap prioritization.
• Start having regular conversations with the team of engineers 1:1.
  
  

In the first six months, you'll:

• Monitor our engineering processes to understand where the common bottlenecks are.
• Have an intuition about what projects are easy and hard based on your understanding of our team and our technical assets.
• Begin actively managing and coaching the team of engineers.