VP Engineering (CTO-Track)

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. 

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 development team 

• 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 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

• Hybrid role based in Belgrade, with regular presence in our New Belgrade (Airport City) office encouraged

• Occasional travel to our Munich office for collaboration and team alignment

• Close, day-to-day collaboration with our engineering team in Belgrade

• 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