Head of Engineering, ISM

Head Of Engineering For In-Store Marketplace (ISM)

Mood Media is seeking a hands-on Head of Engineering for In-Store Marketplace (ISM) who can inherit an existing engineering team, stabilize and improve delivery, and mature the platform into Mood's broader operating model. The role is execution-first: product direction and platform strategy are set in partnership with Mood product leadership; this leader owns engineering execution, operating cadence, delivery quality, capacity planning, and cost-to-output improvement.

Mood Media:
The world's leading experiential media company, serving a global physical-world footprint through music, messaging, digital signage, AV systems, scent, managed services, creative content, retail media, advertising networks, and platform technology.

In-Store Marketplace (ISM): A Mood Media company and retail-media platform built to standardize and unify digital in-store media across audio and display inventory, connecting retailer/RMN supply with demand-side advertisers, agencies, platforms, ad servers, and measurement partners.

Engineering context: ISM is an existing platform and team that now needs clearer execution discipline, better delivery predictability, stronger production operations, reduced key-person dependency, and a scalable cost-effective delivery model.

• A practical Head of Engineering
• A team-in-transition leadership role: inherit, stabilize, document, retain, and improve the current team rather than rebuilding from scratch.
• An operating-model role: cadence, release discipline, support boundaries, on-call/incident hygiene, QA, engineering metrics, budget discipline, and capacity planning.
• A business-unit engineering role: translate product priorities, customer commitments, ad-ops/support needs, and executive tradeoffs into executable engineering plans.

• Own engineering execution for the ISM roadmap, including sprint/release cadence, sequencing, dependencies, delivery risks, and cross-functional commitments.
• Run and mature the existing ISM engineering team, preserving institutional knowledge while introducing clearer accountability, role clarity, and operating rhythm.
• Improve cost-to-output discipline through budget governance, vendor and partner evaluation, capacity planning, and transparent tradeoff recommendations.
• Strengthen production operations: observability, incident response, on-call coverage, release quality, recurring-defect prevention, and support escalation boundaries.
• Partner with product leadership, sales, account teams, ad operations, analytics, support, and executive stakeholders to translate commitments into realistic delivery plans and phased alternatives.
• Document domain knowledge, platform assumptions, integration boundaries, release procedures, decision history, support playbooks, and customer/retailer nuances to reduce key-person dependency.
• Assess architecture, workflows, APIs, data/reporting pipelines, campaign-management dependencies, and technical debt enough to make sound sequencing and resourcing decisions.
• Coordinate with Mood platform and operations teams, including relevant Harmony, Unity, customer operations, analytics, device/network, and in-store media capabilities.
• Protect delivery focus by distinguishing product development from support patterns that should be operationalized, automated, or routed outside core engineering capacity.
• Communicate concise progress, risks, decisions, cost/capacity tradeoffs, and escalation needs to executive stakeholders with candor and context.

• 8+ years of engineering, platform, SaaS, ad-tech, commerce-media, martech, digital signage, IoT/device-fleet, or enterprise-platform leadership experience.
• 3–5+ years running an engineering organization of comparable scale, roughly 15–40 engineers or equivalent blended employee/contractor capacity.
• Demonstrated experience inheriting an existing team or platform and improving delivery predictability without defaulting to a rebuild.
• Hands-on operating discipline across backlog intake, sprint/release planning, milestone tracking, incident response, QA/release quality, observability, and engineering metrics.
• Expe…