Jesse Foster

JesseFoster

Head of Ad Operations, Dexerto

Operations leader who builds agentic workflows into ad ops. Eight years running the ad stack, nearly a decade leading teams before that, and a home lab full of agents.

Experience The AI work Contact

I run ad operations for a gaming and esports publisher, and I build the agents that do the boring parts.

At Dexerto, with a global team, we touch the full cycle of every campaign: RFP, media planning, contract, asset development, trafficking, reporting, optimizing, billing, and the wrap report at the end. That means working across sales, client services, editorial, design, data, and tech on every deal, and owning the stack underneath it: Google Ad Manager, programmatic across PubMatic, Magnite, The Trade Desk and DV360, direct sold media, and rate cards.

Alongside that I've run a long-term contract with WEX Inc since 2021, managing customer and legal communications across copywriters, production, legal, and global marketing teams. It's project management with a compliance backbone.

Before any of this I spent nearly a decade in restaurant leadership with Manna Development Group, a Panera Bread franchisee, which is where I learned to run a team, a P&L, and a training program.

The thread through all of it: I like building systems that let people do less repetitive work and more of the work that matters. Lately that means AI agents, and I've built a lot of them.

Portland, Oregon. Wife, kids, two dogs.

Education

B.A. Business, joint emphasis in Marketing and Data Analytics
California State University, Fullerton. 2016 to 2019. 3.7 GPA, Marketing Honors Society.

Experience

Fifteen years, four roles, some of them at the same time. The striped bar is contract work.

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Dexerto, Head of Ad Operations
WEX Inc, contract
Digital Trends
Manna Development Group (Panera Bread)
Moved into ad operations at Digital Trends in September 2020 while wrapping up nine years in restaurant leadership. WEX contract has run alongside both Digital Trends and Dexerto since April 2021.
Dexerto LtdNov 2022 to present
Remote, London-based company

Head of Ad Operations

  • Own ad operations for a gaming and esports media publisher across direct, programmatic, and PMP/PG deals
  • Manage a portfolio of 100+ campaigns with a combined advertising budget of $15 million
  • Direct revenue has doubled year over year since I onboarded
  • Run the stack: Google Ad Manager, PubMatic, Magnite, The Trade Desk, DV360, Campaign Manager 360, IAS, DoubleVerify
  • Set ad operations strategy including rate card structure, media packaging, and campaign optimization
  • Partner with product and design to launch new ad formats that lift engagement and revenue
  • Lead identity strategy (LiveRamp, Experian, TransUnion, Optable) and supply-path work with SSPs
  • Build and maintain the agentic Google Ad Manager trafficking system and reporting infrastructure
WEX IncApr 2021 to present
RemoteContract, ongoing

Customer & Legal Communications

  • Project manage terms and conditions updates and compliance communications across copywriters, production, legal, and global marketing teams
  • Manage direct mail and invoice messaging with third-party print and fulfillment vendors
  • Run communication outreach reaching 500,000+ customers per month
  • Lead high-impact initiatives tied to over $100M in revenue while maintaining regulatory adherence
  • Continuously improve compliance workflows for speed and accuracy, reducing risk
  • Tools: Monday.com, Salesforce, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Jira, Workfront
Digital TrendsSep 2020 to Nov 2022
Portland, OR

Sr. Ad Operations Manager

  • Led a team responsible for executing $18 million in ad spend annually
  • Managed 30 concurrent campaigns, interacting with 50+ stakeholders weekly
  • End-to-end management of direct campaigns: feasibility, trafficking, custom creatives, pacing, reporting
  • Delivered tracking and analytics reporting to cross-functional teams
Manna Development Group2011 to Sep 2020
Panera Bread franchisee, Oregon

Certified Training General Manager

  • Nine years with the company, most of it in management: started as an associate, then shift lead, then assistant manager, then General Manager with my name on the door, and finished as Certified Training General Manager
  • Trained roughly 80% of the managers in my market
  • Led up to 35 associates and 7 managers, staffing a 5am to 10pm operation across 17 working hours a day
  • Ran weekly 1:1s, manager meetings, and performance reviews for the management team
  • Beat market on all key metrics for 18 consecutive fiscal periods
  • Number one loyalty member reviews out of 140 locations across 8 states for 6 straight years
  • Annualized turnover 40% below industry average; inventory loss under 0.5% on critical categories
  • Spearheaded two café closure projects and new service rollouts
  • Full P&L, forecasting, and cost control on food and labor

What I've built with AI

I spent two years using AI the way most people do, as a chatbot. Then Opus 4.6 landed in February and something changed: I stopped asking it questions and started building with it. I live in the tools now. What's here isn't chatbots. It's systems that take on real tasks: trafficking campaigns, checking compliance documents, watching markets overnight, planning the week's meals. Each one started as something I was tired of doing by hand.

Everything runs with a person in the loop for anything involving money, customers, or compliance.

Claude CodeClaude Managed AgentsClaude APIMCP serversOpenClawHermesSlack agentsDiscord agentsTelegram botsOllama local modelsChatGPTxAI GrokNode.jsPythonSupabaseSQLiteAPI / CLI integration24/7 automationsVercelGitHub
Agentic ad trafficking

Sets up Google Ad Manager campaigns from a media plan. Hours become minutes.

Compliance validation

Checks legal notices and direct mail against mailing lists and proofs before anything ships.

Reporting dashboards

Live performance numbers for sales, editorial, and leadership without a request to ad ops.

Cross-platform database

One place where data from systems that don't talk to each other finally does.

Second brain

Memory that lets my tools recall projects, preferences, and past decisions across sessions.

24/7 trading

Agents that research, paper trade, and run a small live book while I sleep.

Data aggregator

News, market data, and research pulled into one daily read.

Meal planner

Plans the week's meals for the family and builds the grocery order.

Learning activity generator

Weekly activities matched to what my kids are working on.

Websites and prototypes

Sites and interactive demos, including a branded HTML5 minigame for a client RFP.

Job market scanner

Sweeps the ad ops job market twice a week and reports what's actually live.

Google Ad Manager MCP

The custom server that gives an agent safe, structured access to GAM.

Humans stay in the loop for anything with money, customers, or compliance attached.

Start with the boring task everyone hates. That's where the return is.

Local models for private data, frontier models for judgment.

For the technically curious: Claude Code is the build environment, MCP servers handle tool access, Supabase is the shared state layer, Ollama runs local models on a dedicated 24/7 GPU box, and a three-tier autonomy model (act, act and notify, escalate) keeps a human on every decision that matters.

Skills and knowledge

Skills

  • Leadership 15 years
  • Excel 15 years
  • Google Ad Manager 7 years
  • Brand safety 5 years
  • Project management 5 years
  • Compliance communications 5 years
  • CM360 4 years
  • Google Ads 2 years
  • Google Analytics 2 years
  • DV360 2 years

Knowledge

Ad serving, verification, creative

IAS, DoubleVerify, HUMAN, FlashTalking, Celtra, ClipCentric, VAST / VPAID, rich media

Programmatic and monetization

PubMatic, Magnite, Index Exchange, The Trade Desk, Amazon DSP, Basis, header bidding, PMP / PG deals, Placements.io, Boostr

Audience, identity, data

Permutive, Audigent, ArcSpan, LiveRamp, GA4, Looker, SQL, Supabase, IVT analysis

Project and workflow

Asana, Monday.com, ClickUp, Workfront, Jira, Salesforce, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, HubSpot

Compliance

Regulatory and legal comms, T&C management, direct mail and invoice messaging, CCPA / GDPR, vendor management

AI and build

Platforms and models

Claude (Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Managed Agents, API), ChatGPT and OpenAI API, xAI Grok and Grok Bot, Ollama local inference on a dedicated 24/7 GPU box

Agent and tool development

MCP server development including a custom Google Ad Manager MCP, OpenClaw and Hermes agent frameworks, multi-agent orchestration, act / notify / escalate autonomy tiers, scheduled and event-driven agents, Slack, Discord and Telegram agents, persistent memory systems, prompt and tool-schema design, QA agents that check other agents

Languages and interfaces

Node.js / JavaScript / TypeScript, Python, REST APIs and JSON, OAuth, CLI tool building, bash and PowerShell, SQL

Data and infrastructure

Supabase / PostgreSQL, SQLite, cross-platform data pipelines, Git / GitHub, Vercel, static and React sites, SSH / RDP home lab, exchange and market APIs (Coinbase, IBKR, Solana / SUI DEX)

Off the clock

I'm outside as much as I can be: camping, hiking, and time with friends and family. When life permits I'll nerd out on a video game or a board game. I follow macro economics and the stock and commodity markets closely.

And I'm drawn to the unknowns: cutting-edge technology, science, and the discoveries that rewrite history. Atoms make up about 5% of the universe, we've explored about 5% of the deep ocean, and nobody really understands consciousness yet. That gap is where the interesting stuff lives.

  • Ancient mythology and the origins of civilization
  • Philosophy, purpose and personal development, Stoicism
  • Scientific discoveries: ecology, deep sea and space exploration, quantum physics
  • Macro economic trends, AI, Web3, quantum computing
  • Outdoor sports: hiking, camping, snowboarding
Campfire and tent in the woods
Dog asleep on the couch by the fire
Dog sunning on the patio
Family on an Oregon beach at sunset
The end game

A bit more land, grow my own food, raise chickens and maybe a cow or two, and be part of the whole cycle: growing, processing, cooking.

Backyard chickens and a garden

Let's talk.

Portland, Oregon. Remote friendly.