About Affinity
Affinity is pioneering new frontiers in AdTech by building privacy-first advertising infrastructure that helps publishers maximize monetization and enables advertisers to reach the right audiences beyond walled gardens. Operating across 10+markets in Asia, the US, and Europe, with a team of 575+ professionals, Affinity continues to innovate at scale in the global AdTech ecosystem.
Role: Director – Technology (Data & Platforms)
Location: Mumbai (Malad)
Role Overview:
We are looking for a Director - Technology to lead the architecture, development, and scaling of our backend platforms, comprehensive data ecosystem, and AI integration. This role will oversee a polyglot database environment (SQL, NoSQL, and Big Data) and drive the adoption of AI/ML technologies to enhance our AdTech infrastructure.
Key Responsibilities:
Data & Database Leadership
- Polyglot Persistence: Lead the strategy for a diverse database landscape, ensuring the right tool for the job
across MySQL (Relational), Hadoop (Big Data), MongoDB (NoSQL), and cloud-native solutions like Snowflake or BigQuery.
- Data Lifecycle Management: Own the end-to-end data journey—from high-velocity ingestion via Kafka to long- term storage in data lakes and real-time retrieval for backend services.
AI & Innovation
- AI Roadmap: Define and execute the strategy for integrating Modern AI/ML (e.g., LLMs, Predictive Modelling) into backend services to optimize ad targeting and platform efficiency.
- Vector Databases: Evaluate and implement vector databases (e.g., Pinecone, Milvus, or Weaviate) to support AI- driven search and recommendation engines.
Leadership & Team Management
- Lead, mentor, and scale backend and data engineering teams.
- Drive engineering best practices, coding standards, and architectural reviews.
- Partner with Product, Data, and Business teams to translate requirements into scalable technical solutions.
- Play a key role in hiring senior engineers and technical leaders.
Platform & Cloud Operations
- Drive cloud-first architecture and cost-efficient infrastructure design.
- Ensure high availability, fault tolerance, and disaster recovery across backend services.
- Oversee CI/CD pipelines, monitoring, and observability for backend systems.
Strategic Contribution
- Contribute to long-term technology roadmap and platform evolution.
- Evaluate and introduce new backend and data technologies aligned with business growth.
- Act as a senior technical voice in leadership discussions and decision-making.
Required Skills:- 12–15+ years of software engineering experience
- 5+ years in Engineering Manager / Senior Manager / Director roles
- Deep experience with MySQL / PostgreSQL / MongoDB or other NoSQL technologies
- Hands-on experience managing and scaling Hadoop clusters and distributed processing frameworks (Spark/Flink).
- Proficiency in AWS (RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB, Redshift), GCP (Cloud SQL, Spanner, Bigtable, BigQuery)
- Hands-on experience with Kafka (producers, consumers, streams, scaling).
- Proficiency in Python and shell scripting for automation, backend logic, and data manipulation.
- Experience in implementing Modern AI technologies, including Natural Language Processing (NLP), Generative AI frameworks, or predictive analytics.
- Ability to use data visualization tools (e.g., Tableau, Looker, Metabase, Apache Superset etc )
