Yoon (Jay) Lee
Director of Software Engineering | Ad Tech
About Me
Yoon (Jay) Lee is the Global Head of AdTech at TWC with a solid foundation in technical design, cross-functional collaboration, and product management, honed over a decade of diverse experience in the advertising industry. Holding an MS in Computer Science and a BS in Industrial Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Yoon combines a unique blend of analytical rigor, creative problem-solving, and strategic insight. His expertise drives revenue-focused technical decisions that bridge innovation with measurable business impact.
Experience
Director of Software Engineering | Ad Tech
Yoon Lee serves as the Director of Software Engineering for Ad Tech, leading the technical strategy and engineering execution for The Weather Company’s monetization platforms. He oversees a multi-disciplinary division responsible for the high-scale infrastructure that powers advertising across flagship web and mobile properties. In this capacity, he bridges the gap between complex engineering challenges and revenue goals, managing the full lifecycle of ad delivery systems, yield optimization engines, and privacy-compliant identity solutions. He leads engineering managers and staff architects to align technical roadmaps with business objectives, ensuring the ad stack serves as a primary driver of sustainable revenue growth.
Key Achievements:
- Agentic AI Ad Strategy:Leading the strategic iteration and engineering development of Agentic AI advertising. Spearheading the creation of specialized sales, creative, and signal agents designed to accelerate and automate the opaque processes of the current ad ecosystem, replacing manual workflows with autonomous, goal-oriented interactions.
- AdCP Founding Member & Implementation:Named as a corporate founding member of the Advertising Context Protocol (AdCP). Directing the internal engineering effort to architect and deploy AdCP-compliant systems, establishing the new open standard for agent-to-agent communication. This initiative bridges the gap between external industry standardization and internal implementation, enabling direct, transparent negotiation between buyer and seller agents without the inefficiencies of traditional OpenRTB bidstreams.
- Engineering Strategy & Leadership:Direct the long-term technical vision for the Ad Tech division, moving from individual contribution to organizational leadership. Mentor engineering managers and staff engineers, fostering a culture of high-performance and cross-functional collaboration between Product, Sales, and Operations.
- Revenue Operations & Yield Optimization:Oversee the technical execution of yield strategies that influence over $30 million in annual incremental revenue. Drive the evolution of dynamic floor pricing models and first-party data activation pipelines to maximize CPM and fill rates across programmatic and direct channels.
- Next-Gen Ad Infrastructure:Spearhead the modernization of the ad stack by enforcing OpenRTB standards and further decoupling ad logic via proprietary Mobile and Web SDKs. This ensures rapid feature rollouts, minimizes technical debt, and maintains high application performance (Core Web Vitals) while scaling monetization.
- Privacy & Identity Architecture:Lead the engineering response to the cookie-less future by architecting robust integrations for alternative identity solutions (UID2, ID5, RampID) and Customer Data Platforms (CDP). Ensure all monetization technologies remain strictly compliant with GDPR and CCPA while maximizing addressability.
Staff Solutions Architect | Ad Tech
Yoon Lee is the Staff Solutions Architect at TWC Advertising, with extensive experience in building scalable ad platforms and ad SDKs for web and mobile. He specializes in integrating monetization partners, enriching ad calls to maximize CPM, and implementing efficient programmatic and direct ad solutions. His data-driven designs have enhanced user experiences and directly increased annual ad revenue by over $30 million. He works closely with both the product and engineering teams to define strategic roadmaps, align technical solutions with business objectives, and drive innovation in advertising technology.
Key Achievements:
- Programmatic Bid Enrichment:Designed a delivery system to translate all first party user/contextual segments from disparate systems into OpenRTB standards to enrich signals to our bidders. CPM's increased at an average of 10% across all platforms.
- Dynamic Floor Module:Designed and implemented a dynamic floor system that increases the floor prices of different slots depending on the lifetime value of the user along with other contextual signals. CPM's increased at an average of 15-20% and the fill rate did not dip.
- Mobile Ads SDK:Designed and implemented a proprietary mobile ads SDK to decouple the ad stack from the flagship applications. The Ads SDK gave better flexibility and enabled independent updates and feature rollouts without affecting the core application. Reduced time to first ad render by 1.5 seconds and increased average impressions per page view by over 7%.
Senior Solutions Architect (Watson Advertising)
Yoon Lee was the senior solutions architect for all of Watson Advertising. He oversaw the technical vision of the group and guided each sub team (5) in their technical architecture. He defined the framework, platform, and technical stack to align with both functional and non-functional requirements, bridging the gap between project plan and technical implementation.
Key Achievements:
- Ads Platform:Architected The Weather Companies Ad Platform comprising of Ad Builder, Ad SDK and Ad Metrics. Created a single platform to build all dynamic creatives, a Web Ads SDK to modularize header bidding and GAM integration, and an ad metric dashboard to consolidate disparate connections.
- CDP Implementation & AdTech Integration:Architected CDP implementation and integration with current ad partners and ad stack. Developed 1st party custom segment activation pipeline increasing per ad unit CPM by 30% across the board. Created anonymized ID strategy for advertising that increased pure profits by $18 million per year.
- Cross-Cloud Migration:Migrated different components of our Watson Advertising Accelerator platform to improve efficiency and cost. Cloud efficiency and migration saved ~$250k per year.
Advisory Software Engineer / Engineering Lead
Yoon Lee led a team of 6 software engineers and provided guidance to both strategic leadership and technical teams. All SaaS offerings comply with GDPR and CCPA and go through STRIDE threat modeling.
Key Achievements:
- Watson Advertising Contextual:Led a team of engineers to create an E2E advertising pipeline for creatives based on contextual signals. Collaborated with cross-disciplinary AI organizations to develop a common IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) contextual library used now beyond our team. CTR (Click through rate) increased 43% compared to unoptimized programmatic ads.
Staff Software Engineer
Yoon Lee was a staff software engineer for Watson Advertising products. He defined, authored, and developed application architectures for 3 SaaS offerings.
Key Achievements:
- Watson Advertising Builder:Architected and implemented an AI advertisement bot building SaaS that was featured in CES 2019 and released as a public offering in July 2019. Implemented "State of the Art" NLP/NLG algorithm that can consistently scrape and generate a FAQ corpus from websites, optimizing corpus generation and ingestion. Enabled a passive revenue pipeline that generates $250k per ad campaign. Created COVID-19 IBM chatbot on weather.com using Watson Ads Builder, providing up-to-date accurate COVID data from the CDC for weather.com users.
- IBM Advertising Accelerator/Insights:Architected and implemented the Accelerator dashboarding application for users to access their Accelerator Insights. Led development team to MVP completion in 8 weeks. Designed unstructured data flow model for 3rd party insights.
- Watson Advertising:Developed conversational Watson Ad units creating over $3 million in combined revenue per year. Improved existing platform for current Watson Ads campaigns. Reduced production deployment timeline by 5x and implemented automated CI/CD pipelines. Improved performance of backend systems and automated campaign creation components.
Senior Consultant
Senior Software Engineer / Tech Lead
Key Achievements:
- Citibank – NextGen:
- Developed microservices for Citi’s NextGen platform, servicing over 5000 unique high priority clients.
- Created API definitions and integration documentations.
- Developed mobile application features for Citi’s NextGen Android application.
- Primary liaison between IBM and Citi’s client relationship.
- Led daily scrums, managed e2e product delivery and effectively engaged stakeholders.
- Citibank – Innovation Lab:
- Managed the Citi dev-ops team and led pipeline configuration efforts.
- Created multifaceted development environments and CICD pipelines for innovation products.
- Developed Alexa skills, and IFTTT recipes for Citi’s Account Snapshot features.
Consultant
Business Analyst / QA Analyst
Key Achievements:
- Citibank – Project Brave (First Financial Apple Watch Application):
- Developed user stories and process flows for Citi’s iOS Mobile and Apple Watch application.
- Optimized testing efforts and presented an organized and structed way to acquire user data necessary for testing.
- Managed daily scrum meeting and resolved functional blockers.
Education
Master of Science in Computer Science | Interactive Intelligence
Georgia Institute of Technology
Bachelor of Science in Industrial and Systems Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology