Software Engineer - Playable Ads (Creative Engineering)

Who Are We?

RZR is an AI-native advertising platform built for the next era of performance marketing. We operate at the intersection of machine learning, programmatic media, and full-funnel mobile growth, powering campaigns for some of the world’s most ambitious advertisers. Our platform is purpose-built to deliver outcomes at scale, not just impressions.

We are a team of builders, operators, and technologists who believe the advertising industry is overdue for a fundamental rethink. We move fast, operate with a high degree of ownership, and hold ourselves to an exceptionally high standard of craft.

RZR is scaling aggressively with an active M&A pipeline and a platform vision that puts us on a path to becoming an industry leader. This is a rare opportunity to join a company at an inflection point and help shape what it becomes.

Role Overview

RZR’s DSP already serves playable ads that clients hand us. We are now building the platform that creates them ourselves — a config-driven engine with a reusable library of game mechanics (Match-3, Runner, Puzzle, Drag & Drop, Sort/Merge) that can be configured with any advertiser’s assets and gameplay rules, skinned per ad genre, packaged into a single self-contained build, and shipped across ad exchanges.

This engineer owns the playables themselves: the mechanic library, the genre templates, the packaging pipeline, and the network adapters that make a CTA fire on every exchange. It is hands-on creative engineering — we need someone who has shipped real playables into real exchanges and knows where the bodies are buried.

The role sits on Team Apollo alongside the Creative Platform group, partnering closely with design on the editor and live preview, and with the DSP team on campaign handoff and impression telemetry.

Key Responsibilities

• Build and maintain the reusable mechanic library — each mechanic parameterised so a new client or creative variation is a configuration change, not a new codebase
• Multiply each mechanic into genre-specific templates (gaming-install, finance, retail), each skinned and paced for its audience
• Build every playable for portrait and landscape from one configuration, shipped together as one bundle
• Implement the interaction and telemetry layer — touched, tap count, completion %, win/lose, retry, exit point — reported per impression from release one
• Build network adapter shims (Aarki, Kidoz, ironSource, generic MRAID) behind one internal lifecycle contract: ready, start, level start/end, progress, retry, finish/outcome, open-store
• Own the build and packaging path: compress and base64-inline every image, audio file and font into a single HTML artifact that decompresses in-browser at load
• Encode ad-environment constraints — file-size budgets, sandboxed execution with no runtime network calls, format compliance — into automated validation, since there is no client QA step to catch a bloated or non-compliant creative
• Partner with design and the DSP team on the editor, live preview, and handoff into campaign delivery

Required Skills and Experience

Must-Have

• 4–6 years in frontend or game engineering, including 3+ years building playable ads or HTML5 mini-games that shipped to production
• Strong JavaScript/TypeScript, HTML5 Canvas/WebGL, and at least one lightweight engine (PixiJS, Phaser, CreateJS, Cocos, or equivalent) — plus the judgment to know when to skip the engine entirely for size reasons
• Demonstrable experience with MRAID and the playable specs of major ad networks (ironSource, AppLovin, Unity Ads, Mintegral, Vungle, Meta, Google) — including single-file packaging, size limits, and the quirks of each SDK’s wrapper
• Real command of asset and build optimisation: texture atlasing, sprite sheets, audio compression, image encoding, minification, inline base64 packaging, and measuring your way down to a size budget
• Game-loop fundamentals — state machines, tweening and animation, touch and gesture input, frame-rate and memory behaviour on low-end mobile devices
• Responsive orientation handling and cross-device debugging on real hardware
• Comfort building things to be configured rather than hardcoded: data-driven scenes, template systems, JSON-schema-style configuration

Nice-to-Have

• Built an internal playable builder or templating system, not just individual playables
• Experience with build tooling (Webpack, Vite, Rollup) and custom bundlers or packagers
• Familiarity with adtech mecha…