Frequence Engineers: The Cutting Edge of Ad Tech

While an advertising technology company is only as good as its products, it's also true that without talented software engineers, there is no product. The Frequence engineering team is the brains behind developing our all-in-one marketing platform that allows local advertisers to target customers in a highly effective way.

Head of Engineering Amit Dar discusses how the engineering team contributes to the Frequence platform, what core products they are responsible for, and what he looks for in hiring a software engineer.

Amit, how do you contribute to Frequence?

My role at Frequence revolves around three key initiatives:

1. Product: We work hard to understand the business requirements to develop, test, and deploy the highest-quality technologies on the market.
2. People: We want smart, humble people. One of the critical qualities we emphasize while hiring for engineering roles is a down-to-earth attitude.
3. Process: We set up scalable and stable processes so that each team member can give their best output without worrying about how to deal with blockers.

Three essential pieces! What does the engineering team do to support the Frequence platform?

The engineering team is responsible for the entire Frequence platform. We have various technical groups that work independently on multiple projects to enhance different areas of our platform. We work closely with our product and business teams to fully understand and own the business requirements. We then build the technology that supports those needs.

Our technical architects devise an optimal and scalable solution. Our engineers code it using agile methodology. Then, the quality assurance (QA) team identifies any issues and delivers a final solution that is high quality and bug-free. In addition to software development, we also take care of any incoming defects and resolve them promptly.

What are some of the unique challenges your team faces?

We invest large amounts of log data daily from third-party sources where we run advertising campaigns. This data must be cleaned, massaged, and put into a digestible format on the Frequence reporting platform. It is critical to show this data within a few minutes of receiving it because the story it tells allows our advertising partners to make key decisions to optimize their campaigns.

We have deployed various big data solutions to make sure this data is ready to use in a short amount of time. In cases where the incoming data is delayed or comes in partially or corrupted, monitoring alerts trigger our systems to retry automatically and wait for correct data. We also have dashboards that show our partners the health and status of various reporting ingestions so they can be on top of their reporting.

The data is out there, and we want to help advertisers put it to work.

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What are some products you're working on now that excite you?

Our proposal framework is an industry game-changer, and that excites me. The engineering team is currently developing various internal admin tools to equip our solutions teams to produce highly configurable proposal flows.

We are also working towards integrating with external systems like Facebook and Google Ad Manager to provide these products as offerings on Frequence Platform. As media continues to be more fragmented, we want our platform to connect with digital advertising supply mediums seamlessly. This way, local advertisers have every opportunity for campaign success.

What are the most important qualities and technical skills for software engineers applying to work at Frequence?

Our company has three core values: Ownership, Collaboration, and Execution. Our engineers use these values in our day-to-day work. For example, we collaborate by encouraging open discussions and emphasizing alignment with each other. We take ownership of the business priorities and team performance. Execution drives results and helps us meet project deadlines and company goals. While interviewing candidates, we look for these three traits irrespective of the role.

Every software engineer on our team should be good with hands-on coding, writing database queries, architecture discussions, and be well-versed in the core concepts of software development and agile methodologies. We also like to keep the interview process fast and smooth and like to have quick turnaround times.

Lastly, but maybe most importantly, Frequence has a people-first culture. We desire to build long-term relationships within our teams and throughout the company. We look for individuals who align with this vision and who we'd want to work alongside each day. I like to think engineering has been successful in this area – the proof is that teams regularly go out for team dinners, and many are friends outside of the office.

Looking for a career in software engineering? Check out our careers page.

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