About Ad-Shield
Billions of ad impressions disappear every day because of ad blockers, destroying over $200B in publisher revenue annually. Ad-Shield builds next-generation adblock recovery technology that helps publisher restore this lost revenue and turn blocked traffic into a sustainable revenue channel.
We are one of the fastest-growing teams in global ad-tech. With a lean, high-leverage team, we generate millions of dollars in revenue per employee and are scaling an 8-figure net revenue portfolio toward 9-figure potential.
About the Role
As a Software Engineer on the Revenue team, you will work on the hardest technical problems that stand between a new partnership and live revenue: debugging real production environments, identifying root causes across complex web and ad systems, and turning these learning into product and infrastructure improvements.
This is an engineering role first. You will write code, investigate ambiguous failures, improve deployment and diagnostic systems, and work closely with product engineering, account management, and partnerships to make Ad-Shield easier, faster, and more reliable to launch at scale.
In practice, this is one of the highest-impact roles at Ad-Shield through forward‑deployed engineering (FDE): you see real customer environments, discover where the systems are not enough, and push those learnings back into the product and platform. Every fix you ship can unlock new revenue and improve the product for every future customer.
As more coding gets automated, the hard part of engineering becomes understanding real‑world client problems and designing systems around them. This role puts you directly in that lane and empowers you to develop human judgment about which problems matter and how to keep systems working for live customers, a combination that is hard to automate and valuable in any future role.
What You Will Do
- Connect Engineering Work Directly to Revenue: Prioritize technical work based on business impact. Some issues are noise; others block meaningful revenue. You will focus your effort where it unlocks the most value, and see that impact reflected directly in launch success, recovered revenue, and operational leverage.
- Own Root Cause and Problem Space: You will trace ambiguous issues to their true source, understand why they happened, and decide whether the right resolution is a code change, configuration strategy, monitoring improvement, product enhancement, or a clear technical explanation that helps Account Managers guide the customer. You are the owner of “what is the real problem here?”
- Investigate Revenue‑Blocking Issues in Real Environments: Debug complex production problems that affect customer launches, revenue activation, or product reliability. You will work across browser behavior, JS execution, HTTP requests, ad delivery flows, caching, consent, third‑party scripts, and publisher‑side implementation details--seeing how the product behaves in the wild, not just in tests.
- Partner Internally, Own the Technical Path: Work closely with Partnership Managers and Clients to understand issue context, ask the right technical questions, and provide clear internal findings. PMs own customer conversations; you own the technical investigation and resolution path, and make sure what we say externally is backed by solid engineering decisions.
- Improve Launch Reliability at Scale: Help Ad‑Shield move from issue‑by‑issue debugging to scalable launch infrastructure. You will reduce repeated debugging, catch problems earlier, and make each future customer launch faster and more predictable by designing systems that assume real‑world mess, not perfect configs.
Qualifications
Must Have
- Strong Software Engineering Fundamentals: You are comfortable reading, debugging, and writing production-quality code. We care more about problem-solving ability than years of experience, but you should have strong fundamentals in software systems, debugging, and technical reasoning.
- Excellent Debugging Ability: You enjoy ambiguous technical problems. You can form hypotheses, inspect logs, reproduce issues, analyze network requests, narrow down causes, and make evidence-based engineering decisions.
- Strong Web Systems Knowledge: You understand how modern web applications behave in production. Experience with JavaScript, TypeScript, browser APIs, HTTP, networking, caching, or performance debugging is highly relevant.
- Product-Minded Engineering Judgment: You do not just patch symptoms. You think about how recurring problems should change the product, tooling, monitoring, or internal workflow so the same issue becomes easier to detect or impossible to repeat.
- Business Awareness: You care about impact. You understand that engineering work should improve launch speed, customer activation, recovered revenue, reliability, or operational leverage.
- Clear English Communication: Professional written and verbal English is required. You will collaborate with teams across New York, Seoul, and global markets. Korean fluency is a plus, but not required.
Nice to Have
- AdTech or Publisher Monetization Experience: Familiarity with Google Ad Manager, Prebid, header bidding, programmatic advertising, or ad blockers.
- Production JavaScript Debugging Experience: Experience debugging browser-based JavaScript in complex environments with third-party scripts or inconsistent client-side behavior.
- Edge or Infrastructure Experience: Familiarity with Cloudflare Workers, CDNs, caching, edge computing, or web security models.
- Startup Operating Experience: Comfort working in a fast-moving environment where technical decisions have direct and visible business impact.
Why This Role Matters
Ad-Shield’s growth depends on turning signed partnerships into reliable live revenue. The biggest blockers are often technical: hard-to-reproduce production issues, fragmented publisher environments, complex ad stacks, and edge cases that only appear at scale.
This role exists to solve those problems.
You will be close to the business, but your core contribution is engineering. You will investigate difficult issues, improve systems, ship fixes and make the product stronger with every launch. For the right engineer, this is a rare opportunity to work on technically challenging problems where the impact on company revenue is direct, visible, and immediate.
