Senior Programmatic Media Lead

Senior Programmatic Media Lead at Shopify

You’ll be part of a collaborative Growth team that values creativity, experimentation, and impact. With access to significant budgets, a strong data-driven culture, and exposure to cross-functional experts, you’ll have the opportunity to accelerate your performance media craft, while directly contributing to scaling our business.

We are seeking a highly experienced, strategically minded Senior Programmatic Media Lead to own global experimentation, performance acceleration, and innovation across the Programmatic ecosystem (OLV, Display and Native). This role will be responsible for driving measurable business impact, and building playbooks across Programmatic partners. Deep expertise in DSPs is required; experience with The Trade Desk, Amazon, and DV360 is a strong plus.

About You and Shopify's Culture

Moving at our pace brings a lot of change, complexity, and ambiguity—and a little bit of chaos. Shopifolk thrive on that and are comfortable being uncomfortable. That means Shopify is not the right place for everyone.

Before you apply, consider if you can:

• Care deeply about what you do and about making commerce better for everyone
• Excel by seeking professional and personal hypergrowth
• Keep up with an unrelenting pace (the week, not the quarter)
• Be resilient and resourceful in face of ambiguity and thrive on (rather than endure) change
• Bring critical thought and opinion
• Embrace differences and disagreement to get shit done and move forward
• Work digital-first for your daily work
• Deep curiosity for AI

Key Responsibilities

• Own DSP management, including audience strategy, bidding approach, pacing, inventory selection, site/app list governance, and performance optimization.
• Develop a long-term global scaling roadmap, identifying growth opportunities across new markets, channels, and partners.
• Manage forecasting, budget allocation, testing roadmaps, and performance reporting across multiple regions.
• Drive rigorous measurement practices—designing incrementality tests, evaluating attribution models, conducting lift studies, and partnering with analytics teams on deeper insights.
• Build and manage relationships with platform partners (e.g., DSPs, data providers, measurement vendors) to stay ahead of product changes and unlock new betas.
• Partner with product, analytics, engineering, finance, and creative stakeholders to ensure media strategy aligns with business goals.
• Develop and maintain programmatic playbooks, best practices, and governance frameworks to ensure operational excellence.
• Proactively identify inefficiencies, technical gaps, and new opportunities to improve performance, workflow automation, and data integrations.
• Translate complex learning data into clear, actionable recommendations for executives and cross-functional partners.

Qualifications

• Deep understanding of DSPs, including how auction dynamics, bidding strategies, identity frameworks, and optimization algorithms operate.
• Demonstrated success managing full-funnel programmatic campaigns (display, video, native) with measurable revenue or efficiency impact.
• Strong analytical and media measurement skills, with proficiency in incrementality testing, attribution models, and performance diagnostics.
• Advanced experience with key programmatic platforms (DSPs) and ad tech components
• Ability to interpret data and translate insights into actionable optimizations, scalable processes, and executive-level narratives.
• Cross-functional leadership experience partnering with analytics, product, engineering, finance, and creative teams.
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to simplify complex concepts for both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Experience with SQL. You may not be able to write complex queries from scratch, but you have a high-level understanding of databases and how to query them.
• Ability to thrive in a fast-paced environment and can navigate through ambiguity and work with minimal guidance.

About Shopify

Opportunity is not evenly distributed. Shopify puts independence within reach for anyone with a dream to start a business. We propel entrepreneurs and enterprises to scale the heights of their potential. Since 2006, we’ve grown to over 8,300 employees and generated over $1 trillion in sales for millions of merchants in 175 countries.

This is life-defining work that directly impacts people’s lives as much as it transforms your own. This is putting the power of the few in the hands of the many, is a future with more voices rather than fewer, and is creating more choices instead of an elite option.

We may use AI-enabled tools to screen, select, and assess applications. All AI outputs are reviewed and validated by our recruitment team.

Key skills/competency

• Programmatic Advertising
• DSP Management
• Audience Strategy
• Bidding Optimization
• Incrementality Testing
• Attribution Models
• SQL
• Cross-functional Leadership
• Performance Marketing
• Data Analysis