Senior 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.

About WPP Open Intelligence

The Activation team is the engineering arm of WPP Open Intelligence. We build the foundational data infrastructure and high-performance edge services that support WPP’s activation capabilities.

Approximately one-third of global media spend flows through WPP, and our platform is deeply integrated with major supply-side partners across the AdTech industry. At our current scale, our edge services handle more than 60,000 classification requests per second, while our contextual classification pipelines process approximately 10,000 requests per second.

With operations across the US and UK and planned expansion across EMEA and APAC, our infrastructure operates at significant global scale. We are an engineering-led team focused on building robust, scalable, highly reliable systems.

Why We’re Hiring

We are expanding our engineering team to support the next stage of growth and a new catalog of privacy-preserving data products. These products are designed to scale advanced targeting capabilities while protecting user privacy.

Our infrastructure is expanding globally, and we are deepening integrations with leading supply-side partners in the AdTech industry. We are looking for engineers who can help us design for the next order of magnitude while keeping our systems resilient, performant, observable, and compliant.

What You’ll Do

As a Senior Software Engineer, you will own reliable backend services and API integrations in production. You will help drive solutions from design through delivery, raising the quality of both the systems we build and the way we operate them.

You will work across partner API clients, internal APIs, workflow steps, orchestration components, and the interfaces between Open Intelligence and activation systems. We value strong software engineering fundamentals—including clean design, testable code, and sound operational practices—over allegiance to any particular framework.

Design, develop, and review backend services and API integrations to a high engineering standard.

Own and evolve orchestration and gateway components, including workflow steps, partner API clients, internal service APIs, and activation interfaces.

Partner with Product, lead engineers, and teams across audience, data, and performance to turn requirements into durable production services.

Build robust integrations with authentication, rate limiting, idempotency, retries, partial-update patterns, versioning, clear error handling, and operational runbooks.

Establish and maintain production standards for CI/CD, unit and integration testing, API contract testing, observability, auditability, and safe releases.

Maintain an end-to-end view of the activation flows you support, identifying dependencies, incidents, and technical debt and proposing sequenced improvements.

Contribute hands-on to critical foundations such as gateways, tool registries, workflow runtimes, and guardrails hooks; mentor colleagues through design reviews, code reviews, and pairing.

Who You’ll Work With

You will collaborate closely with Product, lead engineers, and sibling teams across audience, d