Adform is a premier partner for media agencies, trading desks, advertisers and publishers, offering the world's only programmatic brand-led media platform to support all aspects of multi-screen brand advertising. Adform's end-to-end ad tech stack closes the loop by integrating media planning, buying, optimization and reporting into one place covering full-featured Demand Side Platform, Rich Media and Ad serving. Adform was established 2002 in Denmark and now has offices in 15 countries including the US, United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Spain, Italy, Netherlands, Belgium, Czech Republic, Poland, Lithuania and Belarus. What is Adform? Adform is a web-based advertising platform used throughout Europe by the largest media groups, advertisers and media sites such as Mediacom, Coca-cola or MSN. As an integral part of their advertising business these companies build, buy, serve and optimize what ads to show different users in real time through Adform. Founded in Denmark (2002) it has expanded to having more than 400 employees across 15 European countries & USA. The biggest office by far is in Vilnius, Lithuania, where most Research and Development, Product Management, HR and Accounting are located. About 150 people work in Research and Development using some of the most advanced methodology and technologies. We are a fast growing tech company in the display advertising industry which is undergoing huge transformations these years. We are coming from world ruled by "you know that half your marketing budget is wasted, but you just don't know which half", to a world where you can model individual consumers, buy advertising opportunities in real time and target consumers across multiple screens based on advanced algorithms and huge data sets. And in this exciting new world our mission is to show the most meaningful advertising to the consumer while creating maximum value for the advertiser. All development focus is on improving the Adform platform. As a result, developers work with some interesting challenges in the architecture and new features which they build. These challenges are especially in: High load Buying, serving and tracking many billion ads every day in real-time give peak loads of well over 200.000 QPS – with each single transaction requires database access and decision-making in milliseconds. - 300 high performance servers - 300 000 requests per second - Complex calculations per request needed in less than 20 ms - Data Centers across the world - High availability load balancing and failover - Decision tree's spanning large matrixes Big Data Parallel analysis and optimization algorithms trawl the massive amounts of data for identifying patterns and enabling reporting - Peta Bytes of data on 50+ servers - Large Hadoop project - Huge NoSQL clusters - Data pattern analysis using multi-varied processing algorithms and decision trees Creative Advertising Adform leads the Rich Media revolution constantly inventing funky engaging formats with video streaming, games, maps, magazines and many other interactions for all devices and supporting e.g. swipe on touch screens - Daily creative production for some of the largest media sites with 10+ million users - Innovative formats - Video, VAST - Mobile, Tablets, Touch screens, Swipe - Outdoor screen controlled through smart phones for e.g. games - Creative Toolkit for Flash - Facebook, Google, Adobe - Large e-shops and CMS platform - Adform Marketplace - TV ads recognition UX and Real-time Trading Users in the advertising industry are used to spicy user experiences and design so the Adform UX team has a high focus on UX and general design - Daily operations as advertising campaigns planning and Real Time ads buying and optimization must be intuitive and simple - Users set up campaigns through our system that spend over > 1 bln DKK - To improve user experience we use modern frameworks and libraries along with in-house components jQuery Underscore Handlebars LESS How we do it?? We prefer flexibility and lightweight requirements instead of huge documents We have short iterations and we are not afraid to fail fast We use 50 sticky notes per team each iteration Being lazy by heart we love automation - Automated testing - Continuous integration - Automated deployment We also love Scrum and Kanban We deliver 8-16 features or upgrade each month We keep a flat organizational structure with small development teams At our regular "Hackathons" developers work two days on their own projects and elect the winners Our Unconference is an innovative format to share ideas among great people