Arcspire

ARCSPIRE

At Arcspire, we're transforming the way that non-traditional Publishers and Rightsholders understand and engage their own Digital Audiences, totally evolving the way they work with their partners.

By using and combining both first party content and third party data, we enable our clients to view their own Audience in an entirely new way and one that simultaneously opens up previously impossible revenue opportunities for them.

WHAT WE DO

Our endgame is to enable our clients to advertise more effectively to their own readers or fans, whether that’s advertising themselves or co-branded partner content.

Whilst working on ads isn’t entirely glamorous, our technology challenges certainly are. We’re currently processing over 2.5 billion events a day at sub-millisecond latencies across four clusters on three continents.

The internet relies on advertising, but 99% of the time it’s a terrible experience. We’re aiming to change that.

Our current focus is on sport teams and governing bodies and enabling them to pitch and offer further incentives to their sponsors. However, it doesn’t stop there for us; any publisher or rights-holder who has fans and engagement will always be looking for more effective ways to increase revenue from their partners and to better understand their own fans. We’re the answer to both; a technology provider first and ad-tech provider second.

Despite the staggering amounts of money that get spent on advertising, our clients can not do this without us. By integrating and ingesting data directly from them and combining that view with an aggregated, heavily anonymised one of our data stream at large, we gain and provide an unrivalled insight into what a clients audience truly is and who it would be valuable to.

This unique insight capability is really what sets us part and so we charge a monthly platform fee. A great side-effect of this is that, unlike almost every other company in the ad-tech space, we do not win solely by serving more ads, we win by serving the correct ads.

OUR TECHNOLOGY

We own and have created each part of our stack in-house. We are not, and we will never be, a mash-up of other providers, held together by 3 languages, 7 integrations and a whole lot of hope. Our technology challenges are hard and they are only going to get harder, but it’s technical excellence and product differentiation that will keep us apart from the crowd.

Our back-end is written in Golang and Java with heavy gRPC communication at both an internal and intra-cluster level. Our four clusters run Kubernetes on AWS via Kops.

For front-ends, we use ES6, React, Redux and lots of Immutable.js. The libraries we give to clients need to be lightweight, so they’re cut back to vanilla ES6 and a small amount of Preact.

The majority of our data analysis is written in python and though we’re not precious about it, pandas and xgboost has featured heavily. Our keyword language models and other model-like things are also prototyped and periodically trained in python, with Go or Java doing the heavy lifting in production.

WHO WE ARE

We like to say that we’re data people doing advertising and not advertising people doing data and whilst that started as a joke, it’s become one of our biggest assets.

OUR PROCESS

Our process is designed to ensure that we’re a good fit for you, as well as that you’re a good fit for us. It involves two stages:

Stage 1: 45-minute phone screen. We’ll go through what we do in a bit more depth, as well as a bit more on your background, finishing off with 10-minutes or so on an abstract (entirely language agnostic) tech problem for discussion (think: “If you had to do X, how would you approach it?”).

Stage 2: On-site assessment. This involves a morning where you’ll sit down with our CTO and go through a few coding or data exploration tasks (we'll give you a pre-brief to prepare) related to what we do. We’ll then have an informal lunch and end with an interview with our CEO.*

(* We get that job hunting can be time consuming, so we can split this stage up and/or do parts of it on a weekend)

WE ARE SMALL AND WE ARE EARLY

Despite having been incorporated for over two years, we are still very small and though we’ve received investor backing and we’re generating significant revenue for a company our size, we still look at ourselves as being early and at the very start of great things.

I’d love to write that ‘these are our values…’ or ‘this is our culture…’, but honestly, though Max & I (Mikey) know the kind of company that we want to run (and we certainly know the kinds of companies that we don’t want to run), we want you to be a part of that discussion.

We want you to help shape a company that you’re proud to be a part of and we want you to help us create an environment where you and everybody here can do their best work and achieve some extraordinary things.