I have recently joined a software company as a software engineering manager in a senior role. I oversee software design & development, hiring, team building and some input to product direction as well). Our business model can be explained as follows.
We are creating a software platform using which our customers can create and operate their own websites. Our software provides some services to these web stores, one of which is the ability to create and post ads for products and services (all realted to real estate: housing, renovation, remodeling etc). These ads will be visible to people visiting our customer’s websites. Since it’s self service, we wont monitor what ads are being created for what products and with what conditions. The primary product will almost always be halal, like I mentioned real estate related, but can potentially be advertising interest payments, mortgages etc for eg, the ad could be for a house for sale but to sweeten the deal, the ad could say that if they buy the house, the buyer will get a $2000 coupon to pay for mortgage fee for their next home. Or the ad could be for renovation services on a BNPL model. The creater of the ad could offer any incentive halal or haram to make the deal attractive. Now whenever a visitor visits our customers website and clicks on an ad, we the platform earn a commission. This model is very very similar to how google and facebook ads work and are a huge portion of revenue for those companies. We will also be providing other services to our customers such as customer and market data, AI related services to improve their home pictures they can then use in their ads etc).
My question is can I work in this company? (Or as a matter of fact any company that earns ad revenue from potentially haram ads). The company is in the US with a non Muslim founder who I report to so ad content moderation is out of question. I am from and live in Pakistan and work remotely. I know that my work as a software engineer is not inherently Haram. I am more concerned about the ad revenue from ads that our customers are posting using our neutral platform but on their own websites. Since it’s very early stages of the company and it’s not fully operational, there isn’t any data on which types of ads are generating more revenue so most of this is for the future.