Sr Software Engineer - High Performance Computing

thetradedesk

Bellevue; Irvine

Posted Mar 9, 2026

Full-time
Software Engineering

Job description

The Trade Desk is a global technology company and the world’s leading independent platform for digital advertising, with nearly 4,000 employees across more than 30 offices. Our technology helps advertisers reach the right audiences across the open internet — from streaming TV and podcasts to mobile apps, news, and more.

Advertising powers the content people love. By making it more transparent, effective, and responsible, we help support trusted journalism, quality entertainment, and creators worldwide. The world’s brands and agencies rely on us to reach their customers and grow their businesses responsibly.

The scale of our platform brings unique technical challenges — from processing massive datasets in real time to building systems that operate reliably on a global scale. When you work here, your impact is worldwide. We welcome diverse perspectives, encourage curiosity, and build teams that learn from one another. If you’re driven to solve meaningful challenges, we’d love to meet you.

What we do

Our Software Engineers are end-to-end owners who will participate in all aspects of designing, building, and delivering data-focused products for our stakeholders. 

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. It’s important we focus on quality at scale in an agile environment that is based on collaboration, ownership, and trust. Our software engineering teams fully own their charter to work on long term roadmaps while enhancing existing features or tools and continuously gaining efficiency.

Our system performs all day, every day serving global traffic. It’s important we focus on quality at scale in an agile environment that is based on collaboration, ownership, and trust. Our engineering managers are there to build trust with our talented engineers, to understand their strengths and weaknesses and to ensure they are motivated and productive, all the while having fun and enjoying every day. 

About the Role:

The High-Performance Computing team powers core bidding platform by supplying large amounts of user and graph data, ensuring data availability, freshness and quality.

You will be working on system-level optimization in throughput and network bandwidth as well as applying creative probabilistic algorithms to support future scale of user targeting data. You will be responsible for ensuring health and scalability the user data infrastructure of as our platform evolves.
We expect our engineers to be end-to-end owners. You will participate actively in all aspects of software lifecycle, including research, experimentation, architecture, coding, quality assurance, monitoring, maintenance, continuous optimization and automation.
We have dozens of mission-focused teams working across a wide spectrum of technological challenges. You will have the opportunity, depending on your interests and aptitude, 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.
Senior Engineers contribute to more than our product – they build up our team. Through a combination of mentoring, technical leadership, and/or direct management of small teams, they make others better and raise the bar for those around them.

We are a global team with different backgrounds, experiences and perspectives. To complement this team, you will welcome ideas that are different from your own and be well-versed in building from common ground to value, seek out, and foster invisible and visible dimensions of diversity.

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:

Skills and Experience:

The ideal candidate will have a minimum of 6+ years’ professional experience in high impact software development environment
Hands-on experience with a variety of platforms and technologies: .NET Core & C#, Java, Linux, Networking, Streaming Systems, NoSQL databases, Distributed Systems
A candidate with deep expertise at the intersection of distributed system, high-performance computing, math and advertising, ideally someone who has built large-scale distributed systems and understands ads ecosystem.
Be responsible for planning and execution of initiatives, guiding and assigning work for other team members, but not necessarily as a people manager.
Understanding of Agile development methodology and development practices.
You have a Bachelor’s/Master’s level degree in a computer-science or relevant engineering related field or equivalent experience.

Not everyone has the same level of access to opportunities. What is most important to us is what and how you can contribute, which is why our consideration is not limited by the level of education you have.

Key Attributes:

You understand engineering fundamentals and think from first principles. At our scale, many off-the-shelf techniques and existing technologies (open source and enterprise) simply don't work. You must evaluate specific solutions for specific problems.
You have proven records of building distributed systems that are always online.
You work with confidence and without ego, hold defensible ideas and advocate for what you believe is right. You are also adept at identifying and evaluating trade-offs, willing to be proven wrong, and support your fellow teammates.
You value, seek out, and foster diversity. We are a global team from many diverse backgrounds, with different experiences and perspectives.
You are a creative thinker, ready to learn and innovate, and not bound by "the way things have always been done".

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 don't need engineers who know all the answers; we need engineers who can invent the answers no one has thought of yet, to the questions yet to be asked. 

The Trade Desk does not accept unsolicited resumes from search firm recruiters. Fees will not be paid in the event a candidate submitted by a recruiter without an agreement in place is hired; such resumes will be deemed the sole property of The Trade Desk. The Trade Desk is an equal opportunity employer. All aspects of employment will be based on merit, competence, performance, and business needs. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, marital status, age, national origin, ancestry, physical or mental disability, medical condition, pregnancy, genetic information, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, veteran status, or any other status protected under federal, state, or local law.

#LI-AD1

In accordance with various US state laws, the range provided is the Trade Desk's reasonable estimate of the base compensation for this role. The actual amount may differ based on non-discriminatory factors such as experience, knowledge, skills, and location. All employees may be eligible to become The Trade Desk shareholders through eligibility for stock-based compensation grants, which are awarded to employees based on company and individual performance. The Trade Desk also offers other compensation depending on the role such as variable compensation-based incentives and commissions. Plus, expected benefits for this role include comprehensive healthcare (medical, dental, and vision) with premiums paid in full for employees and dependents, retirement benefits such as a 401k plan and company match, short and long-term disability coverage, basic life insurance, well-being benefits, reimbursement for certain tuition expenses, parental leave, sick time of 1 hour per 30 hours worked, vacation time for full-time employees up to 120 hours thru the first year and 160 hours thereafter, and around 13 paid holidays per year. Employees can also purchase The Trade Desk stock at a discount through The Trade Desk’s Employee Stock Purchase Plan.

The Trade Desk also offers a competitive benefits package. Click here to learn more.

Note: Interns are not eligible for variable incentive awards such as stock-based compensation, retirement plan, vacation, tuition reimbursement or parental leave

At the Trade Desk, Base Salary is one part of our competitive total compensation and benefits package and is determined using a salary range. The base salary range for this role is

$124,900—$228,900 USD

As an Equal Opportunity Employer, The Trade Desk is committed to creating an inclusive hiring experience where everyone has the opportunity to thrive.

Please reach out to us at accommodations@thetradedesk.com to request an accommodation or discuss any accessibility needs you may require to access our Company Website or navigate any part of the hiring process.

When you contact us, please include your preferred contact details and specify the nature of your accommodation request or questions. Any information you share will be handled confidentially and will not impact our hiring decisions.