Leading the Way in Audio Advertising: AdTonos CTO Thought Leadership Series Part 3 of 3

AdTonos is a world-leading adtech that exponentially increases monetisation for advertisers, publishers and developers. AdTonos’ solutions can integrate into mobile gaming platforms, audiobook platforms, digital audio streams, online radio and podcasts across Europe, the United States, Asia, Africa and LATAM. These solutions operate on smart speakers and voice-assisted mobile devices operating on Android or iOS.

Building for Success: Wojciech Lichota, CTO and Co-Founder

Wojciech Lichota, Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder of AdTonos, joined the company just over three years ago, and dedicated himself to creating one of Poland’s best R&D teams. Wojciech and his team have built and continue to develop the robust AdTonos platform. Through the team’s efforts, today the platform has an incredible reach of over 1.3 billion HTTP requests per month (~250/S), over 272 million unique listeners monthly, and handles over 65 TB of uploads and 1TB downloads per month. The AdTonos platform also impressively logs over 13 billion DB operations per month (~1.5K/S), and has potential to reach 5 billion ad playouts a month, worldwide.

Future Thinking – How do we future-proof the audio Adtech industry?

In part 1 of our 3-part thought leadership series, we interviewed our CTO about what makes working in audio adtech and at AdTonos so special. Part 2 of our series explored the challenges that the industry and its developers are currently facing.

Concluding our thought leadership series with Wojciech Lichota, Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder of AdTonos, Wojciech shares his thoughts about how we can future-proof the digital audio adtech industry.

Is it difficult to recruit people experienced in interactive voice tech?

Definitely! Technology is advancing at such a phenomenally rapid pace that there is always more to learn and more tools, software and code to experiment with and develop skills in. This is the case in tech as a whole, and the more niche the area you operate in, the more true this becomes!

We also have to factor in that while there aren’t many competitors delivering the full range of solutions we provide, some of our competitors benefit from greater brand awareness and so will attract more applicants.

In terms of inspiring new developers – what do you think we can do better? Is the innovation of the products exciting to developers or do they look for more than just that?

I strongly believe that if we devote more resource to retaining the talent we already have, and develop today’s junior developers to a senior developer level, that will reassure future generations of developers. They may otherwise feel overwhelmed without having access to mentors who can support their skills development.

This is the philosophy that drives our team; by creating three smaller taskforces of 2-3 people to focus on one product, we minimise operational challenges in R&D and maintenance. Developers have the space to work more closely with team leads, to be more engrossed in projects as well as rotating backend master and debugging duties to mitigate against overwhelm and prevent major disruptions to all team members. By making their experience as positive as possible at the junior level, we can inspire them to stay in the industry much longer and grow into the dev leaders we desperately need in the future.

What skills do you think will be needed by audio adtechs in the next ten years?

Knowledge and experience in working with various databases will definitely be in high demand. A few years ago, there was just one main type of database, SQL, which was a good tool for most projects and tasks. However, times have changed since then; we now have analytical databases, OLAP, databases that store events’ streaming data, so today there are more and more specialised databases for different types of data.

This is a trend that will no doubt continue into the future, so just knowing one database will very soon not be good enough. Future backend developers will have to know different dialects and APIs to connect with the databases, so learning in this area will be advantageous in the market 10 years from now!

What can we do to make sure junior developers and aspiring developers today will have the skills we will need in the future?

A lot of people in Poland are in the beginning of their dev careers, having self-taught themselves some skills, attended bootcamps, completed online courses or worked on their own projects to learn the basics. There aren’t many senior devs in the market, and a lot of newcomers have never worked on commercial projects. Right now, we at AdTonos are giving these people a chance to start their first tech job with us. We want to share our knowledge with junior devs, build them up and grow our own talent. For us, we place more emphasis on a candidate’s attitude, willingness to learn and good work ethic – we can teach them rest. By creating this more inclusive work culture, we do everything we possibly can to help junior devs become more confident, instead of ‘taking the easy way out’ and focusing on attracting senior developers.

About AdTonos

This final interview with Wojciech Lichota was part of a 3-part thought leadership series focusing on the technological side of a world-leading digital and interactive audio adtech. Part one of the series gave an insight into what makes developing for an audio adtech unique to other developing roles. Part two of the series explored the unique challenges that junior and senior developers are currently facing in audio adtechs.

Liked what you’ve read so far? Considering joining the team? You can see all of our open R&D positions on our careers page.