Lead Software Engineer

WPP is the trusted growth partner for the world’s leading brands.

We unite cutting-edge media intelligence and data solutions, world-class creativity, next-generation production, transformative enterprise solutions and expert strategic counsel in a single company – powered by exceptional talent and our agentic marketing platform, WPP Open, to help our clients navigate change, capture opportunity and deliver transformational growth. We work with the world's most valuable brands and have global reach across 100+ markets, with deep local expertise. Our people are the key to our success. We're committed to fostering a culture of creativity, belonging and continuous learning, attracting and developing the brightest talent, and providing exciting career opportunities that help our people grow. For more information, visit WPP.com.

Title: Lead Software Engineer

Level: Lead Engineer, Data & Technology Solutions

Location: Copenhagen

Reporting to: Director of Engineering

About Open Intelligence:

We are the Activation arm of WPP Open Intelligence. Our team builds the foundational data infrastructure and high-performance edge services that power WPP’s position in the market. With approximately one-third of all global media spend flowing through WPP, our platform operates at the core of this massive network-deeply integrated and adopted by the largest supply-side partners in the AdTech industry. Operating at our scale presents unique engineering challenges. Our edge services currently handle over 60,000 classification requests per second, while our contextual classification pipelines process 10,000 requests per second. With operations spanning the US, UK, and ongoing expansion into EMEA and APAC, our infrastructure continuously interacts with up to 98% of the population in our active markets. We are an engineering-led team focused on building robust, scalable, and highly reliable systems.

WHO WE ARE LOOKING FOR

We are looking for a Lead Software Engineer who thrives on owning backend systems end to end — architecture, delivery, and the people who build them. You care more about sound software design, reliable APIs, and clear ownership than about any single framework or language.

You are comfortable setting technical direction for a squad, mentoring engineers, and turning product roadmap into shippable, versioned contracts. Hands-on when it matters, you design and operate services, partner integrations, and orchestration components in production — authentication, retries, idempotency, rate limiting, and the operational discipline that keeps live systems healthy. You are likely highly proficient in a backend language such as Python, Go, or Java/Kotlin, and experienced with cloud platforms, containers/Kubernetes, CI/CD, and production observability. Interest in infrastructure as code (e.g. Terraform), durable workflows, and AI coding assistants is a plus when it helps the team ship faster without lowering the quality bar.

Beyond the technical craft, you are a strong communicator who can explain trade-offs to engineers, Product, and non-technical stakeholders, and align sibling teams on interfaces. You take ownership of reliability and technical debt for the systems your squad runs, escalate blockers early with clear options, and are motivated by growing both the platform and the engineers who build it.

WHY ARE WE HIRING We are at a critical inflection point in our growth and need to scale our engineering team to tackle an expanding set of complex challenges. As the digital ecosystem evolves, we are actively developing and releasing a new catalog of privacy-preserving data products. These solutions are designed to scale advanced targeting capabilities while remaining uncompromising on our promise to protect user privacy.

To support this product evolution, our infrastructure is undergoing massive global expansion. By the end of this year, we will be fully operational across the rest of the EMEA and APAC regions. Concurr