As an engineering-first company, our foundation is our technology platform and all of the Indexers who come together to improve, extend, and reinvent it. We invest heavily in building a technology organisation that’s committed to our core values and our vision of total market efficiency.
There are five key elements of engineering at Index that showcase how we operate, feed our ambition, lean into trust and transparency, and feel genuine support from our colleagues.
One global exchange, one global team
The global scale and reach of our exchange is core to delivering on our vision of total market efficiency. It’s also reflected in how we organise and operate as a technology team.
Our engineers come from all over the world—from Canada, India, the United States, and Germany—to make sure that our platforms are constantly doing more and doing it better.
Our core value of “Support each other. It matters.” inspires how our distributed teams work together as a single, global team. We work across time zones and strive to create an environment of inclusion and collaboration. Everyone’s voice is heard, and everyone can drive impact.
We are a meritocracy, where pushing for the right answer and delivering value is always front and centre. When we speak of each other or call on each other for help, we use first names, not locations or team names.
At Index, exceptional talent knows no boundaries. We innovate beyond limits and redefine what’s possible.
Trust and transparency in all we do
The ad tech industry has long been plagued by a lack of trust and transparency. Despite advances in technology, the sheer complexity of the digital advertising space has made it difficult for marketers to truly understand where their money is being spent, and what returns they’re getting from those investments.
We live by our core value, “Build real trust. It doesn’t just happen,” and have more than 550 Indexers around the globe dedicated to building a safe and transparent marketplace, operating with integrity on behalf of our customers and partners.
Our team of engineers is constantly innovating to develop new solutions that not only provide maximum efficiency and reliability, but also ensure that our customers receive detailed and fully transparent visibility into our exchange, so they can measure and optimise performance with confidence.
Our commitment to trust and transparency also extends to how we work together. All work and planning is done openly, transparently, and inclusively. We don’t hide our work behind status reports. We commit to what we’re doing, what we’re doing to supporting our colleagues, and to having open and transparent traceability from plans down to each line of code and release. We say what we’re going to do, we say when we’re doing it, we celebrate it when it’s done, and we do it together.
There are always new challenges for our industry and technology teams to solve. Transparency and trust are how we can quickly innovate, adapt, and grow, both for our customers, and as a technology team.
Global scale, scaling our people
Our exchange handles over 350 billion requests every day (for comparison, Google serves an estimated 8.5 billion searches daily).
Managing hundreds of billions of auctions per day (within milliseconds) requires an intense understanding of our platform and the broader ad tech ecosystem. It also means having the skill, vision, and courage to evolve it to the benefit of everyone.
One of our core values is, “Learn it. Then teach it.” As engineers, that means using the right technologies, using them the right way, and helping everyone else do the same. We’re always exploring new technologies and experimenting with new approaches and solutions to drive our industry forward.
Every transaction on our exchange, new media type we take on, and insight we learn is an opportunity to help make us better engineers and to make our exchange better. We learn what’s working and what isn’t, and feed that back into making our team and our exchange smarter.
Each member of our engineering team has an enormous amount of autonomy and responsibility in building code that supports our growing level of scale. Every step we take forward, we move the industry forward, and we help each other move forward as well.
The ideal company size for impact
We work at a human scale, but our work is internet scale.
One of our core values is “Be intentional. Launching is fun. It’s the landing that counts.” We have an intense emphasis on delivery and impact. That means we clear the way for those that are driving delivery, while making sure that we’re all moving together.
Our entire company is exclusively focused on driving value through our exchange. We’re small enough that we can all work together towards common objectives, but big enough that everything we do together can have a huge impact on the global internet.
While we may be distributed globally, we still know what every team is working on, collaborate freely, and get to know each other on a personal level. We have the support and infrastructure of a mature tech company, and the camaraderie, connection, and collaboration that comes with a smaller company. We’re driven to deliver and make a global impact together, and have fun along the way.
An inclusive and collaborative team
We’ve built Index on our values of change, support, learning, trust, and intention. We pride ourselves on our independence, openness, and transparency—not only in our technology, but in our teams, too. Our diverse and inclusive culture celebrates how we can leverage our unique differences to help drive Index forward.
We’re building a diverse group of engineers from all backgrounds because we believe it helps us create better solutions for our customers as well as foster creativity among our teams. By celebrating teamwork, inclusivity, and diversity, we make sure that all of our engineers feel supported and valued within the organisation.
Every day we live our core value of “Change. Embrace it. Lead it.” in a truly supportive and collaborative way. In working together across all our teams (not just engineering, but Index-wide), we’re continually investing in our people and technology to solve the industry’s most complex problems.
As we extend the promise of ad tech to every channel, we’re looking for talented technologists with the passion and drive to help move Index—and the industry—forward. For those who have the grit, passion, drive, and humility to use their talents to make a difference in the world, Index welcomes you.
Learn more about engineering careers at Index Exchange.
