Ship Retail Media Upgrade Safely

Project Context

Criteo’s Retail Media team needs to launch an upgrade to the Sponsored Products ranking pipeline used by a major retail partner before Black Friday. The upgrade is expected to improve ad relevance and revenue, but the current delivery path depends on brittle legacy services in Criteo’s bidder stack and several known reliability issues in downstream reporting. You are the engineering manager for a 10-person team and have 12 weeks to deliver a production launch.

Key Stakeholders

The GM for Retail Media wants the launch live before the holiday traffic spike to support quarterly revenue targets. The Staff Engineer is concerned that shipping on top of the current architecture will increase incident risk and slow future model iteration. The Account Strategy lead for the retailer wants a firm date for client communication, while the SRE manager insists on stronger rollback and observability before any ramp-up.

Constraints

• Timeline: 12 weeks, with no extension because retailer freeze starts in Week 13
• Team: 6 backend engineers, 2 ML engineers, 1 QA engineer, 1 data engineer
• Budget: 180K for contractor support and infrastructure, no additional full-time headcount
• Dependencies: 1 shared Identity/Access change from a platform team due by Week 4; 1 retailer UAT window in Weeks 9-10 only
• Technical debt: 14 Sev2/Sev3 backlog items in the ranking and reporting path; 3 are related to stale feature computation

Complications

1. Two senior engineers argue for a 6-week refactor of the feature-serving layer before launch, which would likely push the retailer go-live past the freeze.
2. The retailer has already told Criteo sales leadership they expect at least a 5% revenue lift from the upgrade.
3. A recent incident reduced trust in reporting accuracy, so Analytics requires additional validation before launch.

Deliverables

1. Propose a 12-week execution plan that balances launch scope with the minimum technical health work required.
2. Define what technical debt must be addressed before launch versus explicitly deferred.
3. Create a stakeholder communication and escalation plan for competing priorities.
4. Specify launch readiness criteria, rollback triggers, and post-launch stabilization steps.
5. Identify the top execution risks and mitigation actions.