In our “Behind the Tech” blog series, we’re delving into the minds of our engineering team members to get a behind-the-scenes look at how they’re solving challenges in ad tech, collaborating with the industry, and making advancements to our exchange.
In this article, Andrew Martel, senior engineering lead manager at Index Exchange, dives into how our engineers have innovated and built Index Marketplaces to empower our customers to grow their businesses.
What is Index Marketplaces?
Index Marketplaces is an omnichannel curation platform built on top of our ad exchange’s existing integrations and infrastructure. It puts trust, simplicity, and efficiency at the heart of buying and selling digital ad inventory.
Our customers, including media agencies, data providers, and commerce media networks, can now curate and package their unique business advantages—such as audience data, specialized inventory, or curation expertise—with our existing integrations and extensive inventory, all by accessing our APIs.
Because everything is built atop Index’s infrastructure, we facilitate everything from billing complexities and payments to maintaining supply integrations across over 3,000 media owners. This provides companies with complete control to grow their unique businesses on a large scale without a considerable operational burden, and our engineers are putting critical pieces in place to make this happen.
How we’re building new features for Index Marketplaces
Index Marketplaces is transforming programmatic transactions to be more efficient and streamlined, bringing significant changes to the industry. Here’s a closer look at how our engineering teams are building new features to enable this shift:
Enhancing the Index user interface (UI)
Marketplace owners create deals, called Marketplace Packages, with various criteria, targeting different media owners, locations, segments, and demographic information. These deals generate revenue by connecting buyers and media owners. We needed to reimagine the old UI to add new deal classes to the exchange that’d target multiple media owners simultaneously.
Using Angular, we’re building the new UI to make it more extendable, creating a fluid workflow that runs through multiple deal classes in a consistent way. The design system for our screen views utilizes common components, ensuring clear patterns emerge in our UI for our customers to recognize and follow. This all comes together to create a cohesive experience where skills gained managing a deal class are transferable to other deal classes and other use cases, such as reporting.
Our ongoing development of new deal classes across the UI also allows media owners to differentiate their specific inventory, enabling higher returns and enhancing their market leverage.
Integrating data providers
With the new UI in development, we’re working on integrating data providers with our exchange to help Marketplace owners build their unique Marketplace Packages using third-party data or their own. Being able to customize and fine-tune their offering makes them as competitive as possible in the market.
Emma Wilson, engineering lead manager at Index, manages the team responsible for creating the process for data providers to connect their complex data sets to our exchange, and they make it as simple and seamless as possible. She shares, “We’ve made integration easy, allowing providers to implement our specs immediately and onboard quickly. The turnaround time is almost non-existent. We’re proud of that.”
Scaling our exchange
Our real-time integrations and the ability to build on top of our APIs offer tons of opportunities for innovation from our customers. By seamlessly integrating their unique datasets with our exchange, they can enrich the auction process and gain immediate feedback on results. This accelerated feedback loop empowers them to quickly adapt to changes in the market and get the best return possible.
It also provides an exciting challenge for our engineering teams as we’re ensuring our systems will still operate flawlessly with the increased scale.
Jasmeet Sawhney, engineering lead manager at Index, says, “Index Marketplaces increases our scale nearly tenfold. We aim to maintain deal activation times within four milliseconds to be competitive within the aggressive digital auction environment and keep our exchange as efficient as possible, even as the platform’s scale grows. It’s a fascinating challenge.”
We embrace the challenge by developing the backend of Index Marketplaces largely with Go-based services running in Kubernetes and focus on building features that can impact as many customers as possible.
Join us in building the future of ad tech
For software engineers and industry professionals, Index Marketplaces represents an exciting frontier in ad tech, offering new challenges and opportunities to drive the industry forward. The introduction of the platform is not just a technological advancement, it represents a fundamental shift in the way programmatic transactions occur, and we’re always ready for more engineers that are eager to change the landscape with us.
Explore what it’s like to work in engineering at Index.
