Senior Software Engineer (Data & Distributed Systems)

Who we are

The Trade Desk is a global technology company with a mission to create a better, more open internet for everyone through principled, intelligent advertising. Handling over 1 trillion queries per day, our platform operates at an unprecedented scale. We have also built something even stronger and more valuable: an award-winning culture based on trust, ownership, empathy, and collaboration. We value the unique experiences and perspectives that each person brings to The Trade Desk, and we are committed to fostering inclusive spaces where everyone can bring their authentic selves to work every day.

Do you have a passion for solving hard problems at scale? Are you eager to join a dynamic, globally-connected team where your contributions will make a meaningful difference in building a better media ecosystem? Come and see why Fortune magazine consistently ranks The Trade Desk among the best small- to medium-sized workplaces globally.

What we do

At The Trade Desk, we believe that each opportunity to engage with all internal and external stakeholders is unique. This means you will have the opportunity, based on your interests and background, to work on large-scale distributed systems coordinating thousands of servers in cloud and physical data centers around the world, petabyte-scale data challenges, machine learning, advanced visualizations, and interactive user interfaces – to name a few.

Our system performs all day, every day, serving global traffic. We build distributed systems in a highly collaborative environment, utilizing a broad range of technologies to solve algorithmic, optimization, and scale challenges.

What you’ll do:

As a Senior Engineer on this team, you will lead the design and evolution of our feed definitions, ensuring they remain performant across a complex multi-cloud environment.

You will tackle the challenge of unifying diverse ingest and egress paths while maximizing code reusability and minimizing latency—even as data volumes surge. Beyond the code, you will empower stakeholders by driving self-service provisioning and increasing the flexibility of our platform.

You will also play a key role in our culture, fostering an inclusive environment where diverse perspectives are welcomed to build better technical solutions.

Who you are:

Our culture is much deeper than just having fun together (though we do that well, too). We take pride in our engineers being trust-builders, generous givers, scrappy problem solvers, and gritty pursuers of excellence. You do not have to meet all the requirements below, but we believe that people who meet most of them will have a higher likelihood of succeeding in this role:

• You are comfortable working on an agile, distributed team spanning multiple time zones and continents.
• You can communicate effectively across both technical and non-technical audiences.
• You have a solid understanding of computer science and engineering fundamentals.
• You have strong experience working with distributed systems.
• You have expertise in a backend programming language such as C#, Java, or Go.
• You have 7+ years of software development and engineering experience.
• You have experience using Spark, GraphQL, Vertica, Snowflake or Databricks (or similar data platform technologies)
• You have experience in the following nice-to-have areas: building microservices, Cloud, Kubernetes, and Kafka.

A variety of technical opportunities is one of the best things about working at The Trade Desk as a software engineer, which is why we do not expect you to know every technology we use when you start. What we care about is that you can learn quickly and find solutions to complex problems using the optimum tools for the job. What you know is less important than how well you learn and innovate. We are not seeking engineers who know all the answers; we need engineers who can invent answers no one has thought of yet and find answers to the questions yet to be asked