Nearshore Ad Tech Teams in Armenia and the Caucasus: How to Check RTB Experience, Shared Hours, Language and Fixed-Scope Terms

A team in Armenia or elsewhere in the Caucasus is worth a call for ad tech work if its engineers have built and run a bidder, a supply-side platform (SSP), an ad exchange or an event pipeline in production, and can walk you through a real bid request from your own logs.

Which ad tech teams in Armenia or the Caucasus are worth a look?

No firm is ranked here. Shortlist a team only if it has built and run, in production, the kind of system you need: a bidder or a demand-side platform (DSP) that buys ads through real-time bidding (RTB), an SSP, an ad exchange, an ad server or the pipeline that counts impressions and clicks. Ask each firm to name the live system and the part its engineers built, and to let you talk to those engineers, not only to sales.

Some of this can be checked in public. Prebid is open-source software that publishers use to request bids from many SSPs and exchanges at once, and each of those connections is a bidder adapter in Prebid's public code, with a public history of who changed it. Prebid's documentation asks each Prebid.js adapter to list “The contact email of the adapter's maintainer.” Check whose domain that email is on, and if a firm says it wrote a platform's adapter, ask for the links to its pull requests.

If a confidentiality agreement keeps a client's name private, ask the firm to arrange a call with that client instead.

How do we check that a team has real RTB experience?

Give the engineers a real bid request from your logs, with personal data removed, and ask them to walk you through it. Listen for whether they start with the deadline. OpenRTB 2.6, the IAB Tech Lab standard for bid requests, defines the field tmax as the “Maximum time in milliseconds the exchange allows for bids to be received including Internet latency to avoid timeout.”

Then ask about the notices that tell a bidder what happened to its bid. OpenRTB 2.6 describes three. An exchange sends a win notice “if the bid wins (not necessarily indicative of a delivered, viewed, or billable ad)”. It sends a billing notice “when a winning bid becomes billable based on exchange-specific business policy”, and a loss notice “when a bid is known to have been lost.” A team that has matched its spend with an exchange's invoices can tell you which notice its system counted and what it did when the numbers differed.

Four more questions to ask:

• What happens to a bid that is ready after tmax, and how do you see how many bids arrive late?
• How does your bidder treat the floor price in a request, the field bidfloor that OpenRTB defines as the “Minimum bid for this impression expressed in CPM”?
• Tell us about an incident at peak traffic: what broke, what you measured and what you changed.
• Who would be on call for our system, at which hours?

Spend the most time on the incident, because the questions about fields can be answered from the specification alone.

What time zone do teams in Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan work in?

UTC+4, all year. According to the IANA time zone database, none of the three countries changes its clocks, while Europe and the US do. With a 9-to-6 working day on both sides, a team in Yerevan, Tbilisi or Baku shares:

• six office hours with Berlin, Paris or Amsterdam in winter and seven in summer
• five hours with London in winter and six in summer
• one hour with New York while the US is on daylight saving time, and none in winter
• no office hours with California

Auctions do not stop at six in the evening. If your traffic peaks between 8 and 11 pm on the US East Coast, that is between about 4 and 8 in the morning in Yerevan. Agree in writing who is on call at your peak, how fast they respond and how they reach someone on your side.

Which languages will the team work in?

OpenRTB and Prebid's documentation are published in English, so an ad tech engineer has to read English well. Writing and speaking it under pressure is a separate skill, and a firm's website will not tell you who has it.

Find out which language the engineers on your project and their team lead will use in tickets, code reviews, incident reports and calls, and hear them use it on a video call before you sign. Then ask for a written incident report the team has produced, with client details removed, and read it as you would read one from your own staff.

Which ad tech work fits a fixed scope?

A fixed scope works when three things are true: the work has a written specification, there is an acceptance test both sides can run, and the result does not wait on a partner's calendar.

Ad tech work that often meets those conditions:

• A new integration with a demand or supply partner that publishes its OpenRTB specification and a test endpoint
• A Prebid Server bidder adapter. Prebid's testing rules, with a JSON file for each test case and manual end-to-end tests, give both sides a ready acceptance test
• Moving event reporting to a new database, accepted when the new counts match the old ones over the same days of traffic
• Getting the bidder to an agreed number of requests per second within an agreed response time, accepted by a load test on traffic replayed from your own logs

Even then, put the code and the tests in the fixed scope, not the date a partner accepts them. Prebid's maintainers, for example, review new adapters on their own schedule. For Prebid.js, the documentation says a new adapter's code is assigned to a developer for review “Within a few days”, and once merged it is “included with the next release”.

Other work does not fit a fixed scope: raising the win rate, cutting the cloud bill by a set share, or tuning a bidder until it is fast enough. The result depends on the market, your partners and your own traffic, so a firm can commit to the work but not to the number. Such work suits a dedicated team or time and materials, with a measurement both sides agree on before the work starts.

Whatever the scope, the contract should state how a change is priced.

What should the contract with a nearshore ad tech team say?

Besides the usual terms, write down:

• The hours the team shares with yours, and who is on call outside them
• The countries each engineer works from
• That the code lives in your repositories and runs in cloud accounts opened in your company's name
• For an SSP or an exchange, that your company owns the contracts with buyers and sellers and the domain listed in ads.txt and sellers.json, the public files buyers check to see who may sell the ad space

The article on choosing a company in Eastern Europe or the Caucasus covers the register, sanctions and payment checks.

Where does amBrain fit?

amBrain, which publishes this blog, is a Yerevan, Armenia software engineering company. Its site lists its ad tech services as “DSP development, real-time bidding platforms, and ad exchange engineering.” RTBBidder is a demand-side platform amBrain built for a client, in Rust and Go.

It also builds the other systems this article covers, in its own words: “amBrain builds supply-side platforms (SSP) for publishers.” and “amBrain builds event analytics pipelines for ad tech: collection, processing and reporting of impression and click events.” It has been building software since 2019 and works in three formats: full delivery, a dedicated team, or engineers embedded in your team.

Its line on ownership is “The client keeps full ownership of the product and the code, except our reusable components.” Ask amBrain the same questions as any other team: whether it would take any of your tasks on a fixed scope and with which acceptance test, and which reusable components it means.

This article is not legal advice: have a lawyer read the contract before you sign it.