Head of Programmatic Trading Europe

Role Summary

The Head of Trading owns the performance, standards, and people leadership of the European trading team, ensuring campaigns are executed to the highest standard across markets while acting as the internal authority on programmatic and platform best practice. The role blends hands-on trading (60% of time), team management, resource allocation, and cross-functional partnership with Client Services and other departments to drive results for Tier 1 clients.

Core Duties

Team & delivery leadership

• Oversee the day-to-day delivery of the European trading team, providing priorities, guidance, and mentorship to ensure delivery and performance targets are met

• Own team development end-to-end: hiring, coaching, performance management, and career-pathing for traders

• Allocate trading resources according to business priorities and workload across countries

• Responsible for the outputs of the trading department across all business units (countries)

Trading & platform execution

• Execute campaign setup across platforms, monitor performance, and optimize strategies (~60% of time)

• Establish and deploy best practices across campaign setup, QA/troubleshooting, and reporting, acting as the internal authority on programmatic buying

• Drive structured testing and experimentation across DSPs and partner platforms, evaluating results rigorously to inform trading strategy

• Contribute to improving the internal monitoring and reporting suite

Partnerships & stakeholder management

• Manage the relationship with external partners supplementing the team when business requires it

• Collaborate with the Head of CS/Account Managers to develop media trading strategies aligned with the campaign goals and objectives of Tier 1 clients

• Collaborate cross-functionally with creative, account management, and product teams to align strategy and execution

• Feed trading insights and advertiser feedback back into product and platform roadmap discussions

Market awareness

• Stay current on industry trends, advertising technologies, platform updates, and new tools to keep the agency competitive

What You Need to Succeed

Experience

• At least 8 years of professional experience on a trading desk (agency or sales house)

• 3+ years of successful experience as a team leader/manager in programmatic digital advertising

• International experience is a plus

• Track record of establishing and scaling trading best practices, playbooks, and QA processes across multiple markets

Technical & domain knowledge

• Hands-on experience with the main DSPs available in the market (DV360, Xandr,TTD)

• Solid understanding of the mobile ecosystem (mandatory)

• Understanding of the digital out-of-home (DOOH) ecosystem; hands-on experience is a plus

• Familiarity with a leading brand safety, fraud prevention, or attention measurement platform

• Strong quantitative and analytical skills, comfortable working with large datasets; coding/scripting experience is a plus

Soft skills & languages

• Strong relationship-building and negotiation skills, both internally and with external partners

• Ability to work effectively in a cross-functional, matrixed environment

• English and French proficiency (mandatory)