Director, Marketplace Yield

About iion

iion is the leading global game advertising platform, reaching brands ideal customers across all gaming environments. We are ambitious trailblazers, aiming to be an indispensable element in brands media strategy. We are a growing team of 50+ people, working primarily remote, headquartered in Australia and consisting of teams working across APAC and Europe.

Within iion, we have built Cognitiion, our AI-driven yield optimization platform. Cognitiion uses marketplace data, automated traffic allocation, experimentation and machine learning to improve how demand partners interact with iion's supply. We are now looking for an experienced demand-yield leader to help us make Cognitiion - and the marketplace strategies around it - progressively smarter.

About the Role

We are looking for a Director, Marketplace Yield to lead demand-side yield strategy across iion's marketplace. This role owns the strategy behind Cognitiion - iion's AI-driven yield optimization platform by identifying what is limiting demand-partner performance and determining what Cognitiion should do differently to improve it. You will work closely with Marketplace leadership to understand partner priorities, use marketplace data to uncover patterns and opportunities, design and run experiments through Cognitiion, and lead the Yield team's analytical priorities.

The role reports into Marketplace leadership, with a dotted line to the VP of AI & Tech, and works closely with Data Science and Engineering to feed proven yield strategies back into the platform.

Role Responsibilities:

Exchange Yield Strategy

• Partner with Marketplace leadership to understand the commercial and performance objectives of individual SSPs and demand partners, and determine which outcomes matter most for each - revenue, RPR, bid rate, win rate, spend or traffic efficiency.
• Diagnose what is limiting demand-partner performance and identify the most valuable opportunities for optimization, working with the Demand & Publisher Success team to drive positive commercial outcomes.
• Lead a small team of Yield Analysts to drive and execute exchange yield strategies.

Yield Intelligence & Diagnosis

• Work hands-on with SSP-level marketplace data to identify performance patterns, anomalies, inefficiencies, and emerging opportunities across supply source, publisher/app, geo, format, device, traffic allocation, and demand rule.
• Form clear hypotheses around performance changes and direct the Yield team's analytical priorities to ensure investigations lead to action.

Cognitiion Strategy & Experimentation

• Own the demand-yield experimentation agenda within Cognitiion - independently formulate hypotheses, design and launch experiments, select target traffic/cohorts, and define success metrics and guardrails.
• Determine what Cognitiion should optimize for a given demand partner or marketplace situation, and decide whether strategies should be scaled, refined, retested, or stopped.
• Build a continuous experimentation discipline where marketplace observations become hypotheses, hypotheses become Cognitiion strategies, and results generate the next set of learnings.

Making Cognitiion Smarter

• Identify new marketplace signals, optimization opportunities, and decision frameworks that could improve Cognitiion's effectiveness.
• Work closely with the VP of AI & Tech and Data Science to translate demand-yield insights into requirements for Cognitiion's intelligence, and establish a strong feedback loop between marketplace performance, experimentation, and platform evolution.

Role Requirements:

• 7+ years of experience across programmatic advertising, SSPs, ad exchanges, yield optimization, demand optimization, or closely related roles.
• Deep understanding of DSP behaviour, programmatic auctions, and demand-side marketplace dynamics.
• Demonstrated experience identifying and improving yield or marketplace performance using data.
• Strong analytical instincts and the ability to work comfortably with large marketplace datasets, recognize patterns, and challenge conclusions.
• Experience developing hypotheses, designing experiments, and making decisions based on measurable outcomes.
• Ability to think in terms of trade-offs - revenue versus scale, efficiency versus exploration, short-term performance versus learning.
• Strong understanding of common demand-side metrics such as revenue/RPR, bid rate, win rate, CPM, request volume, spend, and traffic/QPS efficiency.
• Ability to turn loosely defined marketplace problems into structured analytical questions and optimization strategies.
• Experience directing analysts or analytical workstreams and setting priorities for a team.
• Strong cross-functional communication skills, particularly working across commercial, product, data science, and engineering teams.
• Experience with automated traffic-shaping or yield-optimization platforms, familiarity with experimentation frameworks or statistical testing, and comfort with SQL, Python, or BI tooling are all a plus, though not essential.

*This is a fully remote opportunity. We are looking to hire someone ideally based in either New Delhi, Gurgaon, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Bangalore.