The chief financial officer, in the mythology of the advertising technology sector, is the adult who arrives after the party to count the bottles and determine whether the house can still be sold.

StackAdapt, the programmatic advertising platform based in Toronto, announced on Thursday that it had appointed Blaine Fitzgerald to the position, a hire that suggests the company may be tidying up for visitors. Mr. Fitzgerald spent the last five years as chief financial officer at Kinaxis, a supply chain software company, where revenue grew from $190 million to $550 million — the sort of trajectory that tends to attract attention from investors and, eventually, investment bankers.

Before that, Mr. Fitzgerald served more than five years at Shopify, where he helped shepherd the company through its initial public offering and watched revenue expand from $50 million to $1.6 billion. (His résumé, in other words, reads like a series of before-and-after photographs from a home renovation show, but for balance sheets.)

"As we enter our next phase of growth, his experience scaling global technology companies will be important as we continue to expand," said Vitaly Pecherskiy, a co-founder and the chief executive of StackAdapt, in a statement that did not specify what form that next phase might take.

Mr. Fitzgerald, for his part, offered the standard appreciation for foundations and opportunities. "The company has built a strong foundation with its technology, product, and team," he said, "and the opportunity ahead is significant."

StackAdapt, which operates what it calls an "AI advertising and orchestration platform," has been among the independent players in the programmatic market, a field that has consolidated considerably in recent years as holding companies and private equity firms have gone shopping.

The appointment of a finance chief with Mr. Fitzgerald's particular background — public offerings, rapid scaling, global operations — is not, of course, an announcement of anything. It is simply a hire. But it is the kind of hire that tends to precede announcements.

Original story published in Adweek: "StackAdapt Appoints Blaine Fitzgerald as Chief Financial Officer"