VP Engineering (CTO-Track) - Remote (Europe)

We are looking for a senior technical leader who wants to build, not just manage. This is a hands-on engineering and product leadership role with a real equity path – for someone who wants to co-shape the future of an established video AdTech platform, not just execute a roadmap. You will be the primary technical and product voice of the company, working directly with the CEO. 

This role is fully remote but candidates must be based in Europe.

Your Responsibilities

Platform & Architecture

• Own the technical roadmap for our video platform — player, CMS, ad integration, streaming infrastructure

• Drive the evolution of our backend stack toward modern PHP frameworks (Laravel) or Node.js

• Improve developer tooling: CI/CD pipelines, database migration processes, automated testing

• Oversee our AWS infrastructure: EC2, RDS Aurora, Lambda, S3, CloudFront, MediaConvert, MediaLive

Engineering & Product Leadership

• Lead and mentor a distributed development team across multiple locations

• Establish engineering best practices: code review, branching strategy, documentation standards

• Own the product roadmap together with the CEO – define priorities, translate publisher and market signals into concrete decisions, and give the team a clear direction

AI Strategy & Adoption

• Lead company-wide AI adoption – identify and implement high-ROI use cases across product, engineering, operations, and internal workflows

• Build an AI-first engineering culture – make AI a genuine competitive advantage, not just a set of experiments

Video Player & AdTech

• Lead the next generation of our video player (hls.js / dash.js foundation already in place)

• Ensure reliability and performance of all ad integrations: VAST, VPAID, IMA SDK, Prebid.js, SSP waterfall

• Maintain and extend our AI-driven contextual video matching system (AWS SageMaker, OpenSearch, Redis)

Required

• 7+ years hands-on full-stack engineering background – you write and review code across backend (PHP/Laravel), JavaScript/TypeScript (player, frontend), and AWS infrastructure as an active

• Deep AWS experience in a production environment — EC2, RDS, Lambda, S3, CloudFront, MediaConvert

• AdTech fluency: VAST/VPAID, IMA SDK, Prebid.js, ad server architecture

• Experience with video delivery: HLS/DASH, transcoding pipelines, CDN

• Proven track record leading small distributed engineering teams

• Strong communicator and product thinker – comfortable working directly with a non-technical CEO, translating business needs into engineering decisions, and representing the platform externally with publishers and partners

• AI-assisted development is a core, daily part of how you work — not something you are experimenting with. You are hands-on with Claude Code, Cursor, or equivalent tools and work at the pace they enable. This is a hard requirement.

• Experience owning or co-owning a product roadmap in a B2B tech environment – you understand what publishers need and can turn that into priorities

• Excellent English communication skills (written and spoken)

Strong Plus

• Background at a video platform company (JW Player, Brightcove, Mux, Dailymotion or similar)

• Experience with OpenSearch / vector search, SageMaker, or AI content pipelines

• German or Serbian language skills

• Fully remote within Europe — occasional visits to Munich and Belgrade welcome 

• Regular collaboration with our engineering team in Belgrade (remote/travel)

• Long-term role with meaningful ownership opportunity for the right person

• High autonomy and direct access to the CEO

• A focused, no-bureaucracy engineering environment with a modern AWS stack

• Opportunity to shape the technical direction of an established, growing video AdTech platform