Distinguished Engineer - Web & Advertisement

In this role you will serve as the technical authority for the economist.com web platform and its advertising stack, shaping architecture and decisions at scale. You will operate across product, engineering, design and business teams to balance reader experience with ad revenue, driving high-visibility migrations and platform upgrades. You will lead by writing code, establishing standards, and guiding multi-year re-platforming efforts. This position offers strategic influence, cross-functional collaboration, and the opportunity to impact global reader engagement and monetisation.

• pension or 401(k) plan
• private health insurance
• Employee Assistance Program with wellbeing resources
• Work From Anywhere up to 25 days per year
• generous annual and parental leave
• volunteering days and moving home leave

• Define and maintain a unified target architecture for web and ad tech aligned to subscription and advertising strategy
• Make or arbitrate high-consequence technical decisions on rendering, caching, and platform choices
• Balance ad yield with reader experience through explicit, measured trade-offs and budgets
• Lead hands-on on critical paths (rendering migrations, ad-stack upgrades, consent/identity approaches)
• Ensure performance, reliability, security and third-party code health across economist.com
• Own privacy posture, consent, accessibility, and advertising standards in collaboration with Legal and Security
• Mentor Technical Leads and senior engineers; raise engineering standards and hiring quality
• Translate architecture into commercial value and prepare investment cases with product, advertising and finance teams
• Foster strategic technical partnerships with ad-tech vendors, CDN providers, and consent providers

• Substantial experience designing and running high-traffic, reader-facing web products
• Proficiency with React, Next.js, Node.js, TypeScript; rendering strategies (SSR, SSG, ISR, edge)
• Strong knowledge of mobile web performance, Core Web Vitals, accessibility, reliability, security
• Deep understanding of publisher ad technology (ad servers, header bidding, programmatic supply chains) and impact on revenue
• Experience with consent management, GDPR/CCPA, privacy-preserving identity and measurement
• Proven track record leading large-scale changes without direct line authority
• Hands-on coding ability: capable of writing and reviewing production code
• Commercial fluency in subscriptions and advertising revenue with stakeholder-facing communication
• Excellent written and verbal communication translating technical trade-offs to non-engineers

• Influence without authority
• Strategic thinking and clear communication
• Collaborative cross-functional leadership
• React, Next.js, Node.js, TypeScript
• Rendering strategies: SSR, SSG, ISR, edge
• CDN and caching