Staff/Sr Software Engineer

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 team works with some of the most exciting stacks to keep up with our unprecedented scale. Whether it’s spark clusters, databricks, machine learning, or anything else, we choose the right technology to handle our difficult problems. Our team works together to solve these and other difficult problems. We are constantly learning, building, and working together.

Do you have a passion for solving hard problems at scale? Are you eager to join a team of like-minded, talented, passionate engineers who are as excited by our challenges as you are?

 

ABOUT THE ROLE:

Our Staff and Senior Software Engineers take end-to-end ownership of designing, building, and delivering the high-performance systems and data products that power our platform. You will actively participate in all aspects of this process.

You will tackle petabyte-scale data challenges and large-scale, low-latency distributed systems coordinating thousands of servers across both cloud and physical data centers worldwide, alongside high-throughput data pipelines, real-time services, and machine learning, to name just a few.

You will work on a variety of problems, which may include high-throughput data ingestion and processing pipelines, large-scale storage systems, low-latency services and APIs, performance optimization, automation, data quality, data governance, and data privacy.

You will collaborate closely with engineers, data scientists, and product partners across the company to bring exceptional solutions to our customers.

WHO WE ARE LOOKING FOR:

You have a sustained track record of making significant, self-directed, and end-to-end contributions to large and impactful engineering projects. You think beyond just the task at hand to deeply understand the 'why' behind what you are doing.

You understand engineering fundamentals and are a creative thinker. At our scale, many off-the-shelf techniques and existing technologies (open source and enterprise) simply don't work. You are able to work from first principles to evaluate solutions and adapt them to a unique environment. You are not bound by "the way things have always been done". 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.

You have experience building large-scale, distributed, or data-intensive systems. You've developed with a variety of platforms and technologies, such as C++, .NET Core, Rust, Spark, Kafka, Kubernetes, etc..

You care deeply about performance and efficiency. You are comfortable profiling and analyzing complex systems, identifying bottlenecks, and improving latency, throughput, and resource utilization at scale.

Bonus: experience with GPU or high-performance computing (HPC) is a plus, but not required — for example, ML model serving and inference optimization, GPU profiling and performance analysis, or kernel- and operator-level optimization. We care more about strong engineering fundamentals and a willingness to learn.

You have an impact-focused mindset. You connect deep technical work to real outcomes — the performance, efficiency, reliability, and cost wins that empower teams across the company — and take pride in pushing one of the world's largest and most influential industries toward a vision of openness, transparency, and evidence-based decision-making.

You work with confidence and without ego. Our engineers exercise a high degree of leadership in their daily work: you drive technical direction, mentor and share your knowledge generously, and advocate for what you believe is right with strongly-held, defensible ideas. You are also adept at identifying and evaluating trade-offs, willing to be proven wrong, and quick to walk through fire to support your fellow teammates.

Variety of technical opportunity 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.