Distinguished Engineer - Web & Advertisement

The role

The Economist is consolidating Product, Engineering, Delivery, Design and Quality into a single Technology organisation built around durable, cross-functional teams aligned to coherent product and platform domains. Alongside the accountable leaders who run each domain, a small number of Distinguished Engineers hold technical authority across them: they set architectural direction, own the hardest technical problems and raise the engineering bar, without line-management responsibility.

Web is one of those domains. economist.com is where readers discover, subscribe to and engage with The Economist, and where advertising is delivered. The reader experience and advertising need to be designed together, so that each strengthens the other.

The Distinguished Engineer, Web & Advertising role is created to give that combined surface a single senior technical authority: someone who owns the target architecture for the web platform and the advertising stack together, makes the consequential trade-offs between them on the evidence, and is the most credible engineer in the room on high-traffic web and ad technology at scale. The role sits at the same level as Head of Product & Engineering and works as the technical counterpart to the Head of Product & Engineering, Web, and to advertising leadership.

Responsibilities

The role holds technical authority over the web platform and the advertising technology that runs on and alongside it:

• Web platform and architecture: The economist.com stack, rendering strategy (SSR, SSG, ISR, edge), CDN and caching, the design system, and the shared front-end and back-end-for-front-end services used across the site.
• Performance and quality: Mobile web performance, Core Web Vitals, accessibility, reliability, security and the technical health of everything shipped on economist.com, including third-party code.
• Discovery: Technical SEO, structured data and generative engine optimisation (GEO), and how the platform responds to AI-driven answer engines and changing referral patterns.
• Advertising technology: Ad serving and delivery, header bidding and programmatic integrations, direct-sold and sponsored formats, viewability, brand safety and ad-quality controls.
• Consent, privacy and data: Consent management, privacy-compliant identity and targeting, first-party data and contextual signals, measurement and attribution, and compliance with GDPR, CCPA and the post-third-party-cookie landscape.
• Experimentation and observability: Feature flagging, A/B testing infrastructure, real-user monitoring and the instrumentation that measures both reader and advertising outcomes.

The role works across every team that builds on the web or touches advertising, with the Head of Product & Engineering, Web, Engineering Managers, Technical Leads, Advertising Sales and Operations, Marketing, Data, Security, Legal and Editorial as partners. It does not own a team or a roadmap; it owns the technical direction those roadmaps deliver against.

Accountabilities

• Set the web and advertising technical strategy: Define and maintain a single target architecture for the web platform and ad stack, and a sequenced, costed path from today’s estate to it, aligned to subscription and advertising strategy and agreed with domain leaders.
• Own the hardest technical decisions: Make or arbitrate the high-consequence calls on rendering and caching strategy, framework and platform choices, ad-tech vendor selection, build or buy, and how advertising and third-party code are loaded. Record them so they can be understood and challenged.
• Balance revenue and experience on the evidence: Turn the tension between ad yield and reader experience into explicit, measured trade-offs: set budgets for performance, layout stability and third-party weight, and design the architecture so both can improve together.
• Lead from the code: Stay hands-on: design, prototype, write and review code on the critical paths, and lead directly on the most complex initiatives, such as rendering migrations, ad-stack re-platforming or a new consent and identity approach.
• Guarantee performance, reliability and security: Set the standards for Core Web Vitals, availability, observability, supply-chain and third-party script security, and incident response, and lead technical response and root-cause analysis for major web and advertising incidents.
• Hold the line on privacy and compliance: Own the technical posture on consent, privacy regulation, accessibility (WCAG) and advertising standards, working with Legal, Data and Security.
• Raise the engineering bar: Mentor and develop Technical Leads and Staff and Principal Engineers; shape web engineering standards, review practice and hiring bars; and be a visible reason strong engineers join and stay.
• Connect technology to commercial outcomes: Translate architecture into business terms (subscription conversion, ad revenue and yield, viewability, organic traffic, cost to serve) and build the technical case for investment.
• Lead strategic technical partnerships: Hold the technical relationship with strategic web and ad-tech vendors and partners, including ad servers, supply-side platforms, consent providers and CDN providers, and influence their roadmaps where it matters to us.

Who you are

• Web engineering at scale: Substantial experience designing and running high-traffic, customer-facing web products, with extensive experience in engineering and a significant part of it as a senior technical authority. Media, publishing or other ad-funded and subscription-funded context strongly preferred.
• Modern web stack mastery: Expert, hands-on command of React, Next.js, Node.js and TypeScript, and of rendering strategies (SSR, SSG, ISR, edge), CDN and caching, CI/CD and testing.
• Mobile web performance: Deep expertise in Core Web Vitals, rendering performance, device and network constraints, and in keeping a fast site fast while carrying advertising and third-party code.
• Advertising technology: Strong working knowledge of the publisher-side ad stack: ad servers, header bidding and programmatic supply chains, ad formats and delivery, viewability and measurement, and how they affect page performance and revenue.
• Consent, privacy and identity: Practical experience of consent management, privacy regulation (GDPR, CCPA), and privacy-preserving identity, targeting and measurement in a changing cookie landscape.
• Leading large-scale change without line authority: Evidence of setting direction across multiple teams and leading complex, multi-year migrations or re-platforming through influence, written argument and technical credibility.
• Hands-on credibility: Still writes and reviews production code, and can go deep on design, debugging and performance alongside senior engineers.
• Commercial fluency: Understands how a publisher earns from both subscriptions and advertising, and can build and defend investment cases with product, advertising and finance leaders.
• Communication: Exceptional written and verbal communication; able to make trade-offs plain to engineers, commercial leaders and executives alike.

Desirable

• Technical SEO and GEO: Practical experience of organic discovery engineering, structured data, and how AI-driven answer engines change traffic and content strategy.
• Experimentation at scale: Experience building and running a high-cadence A/B testing programme with credible statistical practice, across both reader and advertising outcomes.
• Paywall and subscription integration: Familiarity with paywall, registration and entitlement flows, and with balancing them against advertising and SEO.
• Design systems and accessibility: Experience owning a design system and meeting WCAG obligations across a large surface.
• Advertising data and products: Experience with first-party data platforms, contextual targeting, clean rooms or custom ad products and sponsored content formats.
• AI-enabled ways of working: Using AI tooling to improve engineering productivity and quality, or web and advertising outcomes such as personalisation, ad yield or content discovery.
• Industry standing: Public contributions such as talks, writing, open source or standards work (for example W3C, IAB Tech Lab or Prebid) in web or advertising engineering.

Attributes

• Holds the reader and the advertiser in view at the same time, and refuses to treat either as an afterthought.
• Direct and evidence-led: makes the trade-off explicit, states the assumption, measures the result.
• Leads through influence rather than hierarchy; is sought out by teams rather than imposed on them.
• Credible with senior engineers and with commercial and editorial leaders in the same week.
• Builds and simplifies: prefers fewer, faster, better systems and removes complexity and page weight rather than adding them.
• Raises the standard of the people around them and multiplies the impact of every team they touch.

#LI-Hybrid