Lead Backend Engineer

At Digital Turbine, we make mobile advertising experiences more meaningful and rewarding for users, app publishers, and advertisers — intelligently connecting people in more ways, across more devices. We provide app publishers and advertisers with powerful ads and experiences that captivate consumers, fuel performance, and help telecoms and OEMs supercharge awareness, acquisition, and monetization. In a rapidly evolving industry, we are constantly innovating and creating better paths of discovery to connect consumers, publishers, and advertisers across the mobile ecosystem.

Please note that Digital Turbine is a hybrid work environment-only candidates local to the posting location will be considered.

About the Role

Digital Turbine operates on autonomous, outcome-driven engineering pods where technical ownership meets massive platform scale. We hire engineers, not single-language specialists: we care that you can reason deeply about distributed systems, choose the optimal tool for the problem, and ship low-latency, highly reliable software.

As a Lead Backend Engineer, you will serve as a technical anchor and authority across our core platform architecture. You will be responsible for pushing complex computational logic, data modeling, and heavy algorithmic weight into robust, low-latency microservices that connect supply, demand, and marketplace workflows across Digital Turbine's ecosystem. In this role, your influence extends well beyond feature implementation—you will architect core backend systems, optimize throughput under massive concurrency, mentor engineering talent, and raise the standard for engineering excellence across the organization.

About the Lead Backend Engineer Role

• Architectural Leadership & Strategy: Lead the backend design, technical roadmap, and end-to-end execution of scalable, fault-tolerant platform services and APIs. Ensure system architectures are designed for long-term maintainability, predictability, and low-risk evolution
• Heavy Backend & Algorithmic Engineering: Drive low-latency optimization and algorithmic problem-solving to manage massive throughput and real-time marketplace dynamics. Abstract system complexity away from downstream surfaces by building resilient, high-performance back-end services
• API & Platform Ecosystem Design: Define, build, and maintain clean, well-governed APIs (REST, gRPC) and asynchronous messaging interfaces that integrate Digital Turbine's products into a unified, modular architecture rather than isolated silos.
• Polyglot System Optimization: Evaluate and select the best language and toolstack for each technical domain (running across JVM, Go, Node, or other ecosystems), optimizing for performance, concurrency, and memory utilization
• Production Excellence & Operational Ownership: Own backend services through their full production lifecycle. Implement advanced telemetry, distributed tracing, automated failover, and performance tuning to ensure high availability and SLA compliance
• Technical Governance & Mentorship: Act as a force multiplier across pods by mentoring engineers, establishing backend design principles, leading rigorous code and architectural reviews, and promoting modern software engineering practices
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner directly with Product Leads, System Architects, and Data Engineering teams to convert complex business goals into clear technical strategies and execution plans

About You as the Lead Backend Engineer

• Experience: 8+ years of hands-on experience building, scaling, and operating high-throughput backend platforms in production, with demonstrated technical leadership on distributed systems (Radford P4 benchmark)
• Algorithmic & System Design Mastery: Strong foundations in computer science, memory management, data structures, and distributed algorithms with a track record of solving high-concurrency and resource-optimization challenges
• Polyglot Proficiency: Expert command of at least two backend ecosystems (e.g., Java, Go, Kotlin, Scala, Python, C++, TypeScript) with an objective, problem-first approach to choosing technical stacks
• Data Engineering & Persistence: Deep experience with relational (PostgreSQL, MySQL) and distributed/NoSQL data stores (Redis, Cassandra, DynamoDB, Elasticsearch), including query optimization and data pipeline architecture
• API & Distributed Systems Architecture: Demonstrated expertise designing enterprise-grade APIs, event-driven architectures (Kafka, RabbitMQ), and microservice integration patterns
• Autonomy & Technical Drive: Proven ability to navigate ambiguity, drive technical consensus across teams, and independently deliver mission-critical software
• Education: B.Sc. or M.Sc. in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or equivalent practical/military experience

Preferred Qualifications

• Cloud Native & DevOps: Proficiency with container orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes), cloud infrastructure (AWS or GCP), and automated CI/CD pipelines
• AdTech & High-Scale Systems: Exposure to ad exchange mechanics, Real-Time Bidding (RTB), high-frequency trading platforms, or large-scale data analytics platforms
• AI & ML Integration: Experience incorporating machine learning models, inference engines, or automated streaming pipelines into high-availability backend service workflows

About Digital Turbine:

Digital Turbine (NASDAQ: APPS) powers superior mobile consumer experiences and results for the world’s leading telcos, advertisers and publishers. Our end-to-end platform uniquely simplifies the ability to supercharge awareness, acquisition and monetization — connecting our partners to more consumers, in more ways, across more devices.

The company is headquartered in Austin, Texas, with global offices in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, Berlin, Singapore, Tel Aviv, and other cities around the world, serving top agency, app developer, and advertising markets.

We are honored to have achieved numerous awards as an employer of choice, around the world, including: BuiltIn's Best Places to Work Awards in 2022, 2023 and 2024, DUNS 100 Best Places to Work in Tech for 2023 and 2024, and BDICode's 100 Best Companies to Work in 2024.

Digital Turbine is an equal opportunity employer committed to exemplifying diversity and inclusion around the world. We welcome people of different backgrounds, experiences, abilities, and perspectives. We embed diversity in our mindset, products, and teams to empower an inclusive, equitable, and culturally fluent environment. Building and continuously fostering this culture within our teams makes us better collaborators, partners, and innovators.

Digital Turbine will process the information you provide during the application process in accordance with the Digital Turbine Global Recruitment Privacy Notice.