Ask our tech team what it felt like to build Realize ID, and you’ll get a colorful mix of reactions: demanding, fascinating, eye-opening, challenging, and puzzling.
That blend of curiosity and complexity makes sense once you understand what this team set out to build: Realize ID, a unified identity solution that enables performance marketers to capture and act on open-web intent across a fragmented internet. Building out a robust mapping technology for advertisers, while putting user privacy first, takes far more than massive datasets or machine learning models; it takes global collaboration and a team that genuinely loves solving puzzles together.
So we asked the people who built it to tell us about it themselves.
Meet the Team
Yevgeny Tkach, Machine Learning Engineer
Having celebrated a decade at Taboola, Yevgeny describes building Realize ID as a demanding yet rewarding experience.
On team culture & growth: “I joined the team while the product was already being built, but they openly welcomed me. The work, despite being challenging, is really about helping each other grow. Everyone was excited because they could get more done in an environment of true innovation, working with new tools, building new skills, and doing things that are new to them.”
Tomer Tunitsky
, Sr. Product Manager
Two years into his Taboola career, Tomer views identity resolution as a connected puzzle where every open web signal is a piece waiting to find its place.
On team culture & growth: “In a short time we built a massive task force with so much knowledge, curiosity, and commitment to make an impact. Everyone is so dedicated to their work, and so nice to work with. Even across teams or departments, everyone here makes the time to help each other.
Shanir Frid, Backend Engineer
Now in her second year at Taboola, Shanir describes building Realize ID as completely eye-opening.
On team culture & growth: “Working on Realize ID allowed me to meet and partner directly with algorithm team members. We worked from the backend side while they worked from the algorithm side, connecting two different domains and skill sets to build something beautiful together. What I like about working at Taboola is meeting talented and professional people across the world.”
Saleh Abusalah
, Software Engineer
With five years of engineering experience at Taboola, Saleh found this project intensely challenging as he focused on engineering real-time dynamic grouping engines.
On team culture & growth: “Working on Realize ID helped me build a close relationship between R&D, product managers, algorithm engineers, and data engineers. What I love about working at Taboola is building and delivering impactful products all the time alongside amazing, talented people.”
Dina Svetlitsky, Algorithm Engineer
Having spent five years at Taboola, Dina found the process of uncovering hidden signals delightfully puzzling, requiring detective work across unexplored datasets.
On team culture & growth: “During my work on Realize ID, I collaborated with people across analytics, R&D, and product. R&D helped us bridge heavy data engineering with complex AI models, and I enjoyed learning from different perspectives. I love working with talented people who teach me a lot each day and make building great things feel like an adventure.”
What building Realize ID revealed about how people use the web
For our tech team, one of the coolest parts of building Realize ID was gaining a better understanding of how users actually browse the open web. Working with data at this scale quickly busted the myth that consumers have static digital habits.
In reality, the team learned that a single user’s digital footprint changes constantly throughout the day. Someone might catch up on news on their phone during a morning commute, research niche blogs on a laptop at lunch, and browse for shoes on a tablet by evening. Users explore multiple sites, compare options, and jump rapidly from long-term consideration to making a purchase. Designing an engine that could map those fast-moving touchpoints in real time was a huge technical challenge.
How global collaboration built Realize ID
Because the product touches everything from raw web traffic to complex machine learning, teams across Los Angeles, Taiwan, Israel, and Greece had to sync up across time zones to connect their own unique piece of the picture.
Specialized engineering teams built the pipelines to stream regional web traffic directly into Taboola’s core models. At the same time, algorithm researchers worked side-by-side with backend developers, combining big data engineering with predictive AI to turn everyday online actions into clear audience insights. To keep everyone on the same page, product managers and data engineers designed visual maps that made complex data connections easy for teams around the world to understand.
Why engineers and product leaders thrive at Taboola
What keeps engineers and product leaders inspired at Taboola isn’t just the scale of the technology, it’s the culture of continuous growth and the people by their side.
Tomer adds, “I’m really grateful for this company and the amazing people I met along the way, and I can’t wait to work on more initiatives and make more impact.”
Whether in R&D, product, or analytics, engineers and product leaders choose Taboola because it gives them the space, autonomy, and massive datasets needed to solve the open web’s biggest challenges.
To learn more about why we are consistently ranked as a great place to work, check out the Taboola Life blog. Visit our careers page and realize your potential with #TaboolaLife.
