At a Glance
- Tasks: Design, build, and operate high-performance systems for a leading digital advertising platform.
- Company: Join The Trade Desk, a global tech leader in digital advertising.
- Benefits: Competitive salary, inclusive culture, and opportunities for professional growth.
- Other info: Diverse team environment with a focus on collaboration and innovation.
- Why this job: Make a worldwide impact while solving complex technical challenges.
- Qualifications: Experience in production systems, distributed systems, and coding in C# or Kotlin.
The predicted salary is between 59400 - 72600 £ per year.
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: you design, build, and operate the systems that power our platform.
We are part of the High Performance Computing (HPC) team, which supplies the core bidding platform with data and guarantees its availability, freshness, and quality.
Within HPC, the First Party taskforce owns how advertisers bring their own data onto our platform, and how that data is priced and monetized.
Three connected domains
- Bringing an advertiser's own customer data onto the platform.
Advertisers arrive with their own customer lists.
We ingest that data, anonymize it so the underlying personal information is never exposed, and make it usable for advertising.
- Capturing what people do on an advertiser's own site.
Tracking pixels that fire when someone views a product or completes a purchase.
One signal, two jobs: it proves which ads drove the sale, and it lets the advertiser re-reach the visitors who didn't buy.
- Pricing and charging for platform usage. Working out what each customer owes and why. This feeds billing directly, so a wrong number is a real problem, not a rounding error.
Concretely: Graph QL APIs behind customer-facing workflows, Kafka-driven asynchronous pipelines moving data between services and regions, and the transactional stores that keep it all consistent — running 24/7 across multiple regions.
You will work across two stacks, C#/.
NET and Kotlin on the JVM, with real-time ingestion, services, and APIs spread across both — so comfort moving between languages matters more than depth in either one.
What you’ll do
- Own systems end to end — design, production, and on-call.
- Build and maintain backend services and Graph QL APIs used by internal teams, customers, and partner integrations.
- Build the pipelines that ingest, validate, and anonymize first party data, turning advertiser PII into tokens that can be targeted on the platform.
- Work inside a secure enclave where PII must never touch general‑purpose infrastructure, and design around that constraint rather than against it.
- Get asynchronous correctness right — retries, ordering, idempotency, partial failure — where a message can arrive twice, late, or out of order.
- Own cross‑system changes across services, APIs, and databases, with the test coverage, observability, and monitoring to prove they hold.
- Turn ambiguous requirements from product and business partners into designs, and shape long‑term technical strategy.
- Raise the bar around you through code review, design feedback, and mentoring.
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 work to build from common ground—valuing and fostering both visible and invisible dimensions of diversity.
Who you are
- Extensive experience building and operating production systems in high‑scale or high‑impact environments.
- Solid CS fundamentals and hands‑on breadth across distributed systems: .
NET/C#, Kotlin or another JVM language, Linux, networking, message brokers such as Kafka, SQL/No SQL databases.
- Has owned event‑driven, asynchronous systems — message‑based processing, schema and data‑model design, and consistency across services that never talk synchronously.
- Writes maintainable code and is diligent about testing, validation, and production reliability.
- Takes complex problems from ambiguity to execution, and collaborates across teams to do it.
- Communicates clearly with technical and non‑technical audiences alike.
Nice to have
- Designing or operating a Graph QL API, especially in a federated / subgraph setup.
- Systems handling PII or regulated data, and the privacy constraints that come with it.
We care less about knowing every tool we use and more about your ability to learn quickly, think critically, and build thoughtful solutions to complex problems.
As an Equal Opportunity Employer, The Trade Desk is committed to creating an inclusive hiring experience where everyone has the opportunity to thrive.
#J-18808-Ljbffr
Senior Software Engineer - High Performance Computing (HPC) employer: The Trade Desk, Inc.
The Trade Desk, Inc. is an exceptional employer located in Greater London, offering a dynamic work environment that fosters innovation and collaboration among its employees. With a strong emphasis on diversity and inclusion, the company provides ample opportunities for professional growth and development, ensuring that every team member can contribute their unique skills to the global digital advertising platform. Employees enjoy a culture that values creativity and teamwork, making it a rewarding place to build a meaningful career.
StudySmarter Expert Advice🤫
We think this is how you could land Senior Software Engineer - High Performance Computing (HPC)
✨Join Local Tech Meetups
Get out there and mingle with fellow developers by joining local tech meetups. It’s a fantastic way to meet people who might be working at The Trade Desk, Inc. or know someone who does. Plus, you can pick up some trendy tech skills and trends while you're at it!
✨Contribute to Open Source Projects
Show off your coding chops by jumping into open-source projects. Not only does this give you practical experience, but it also gets you noticed in the dev community. You'll create a killer portfolio that speaks volumes about your skills to The Trade Desk, Inc..
✨Tap into Online Developer Communities
Don’t underestimate the power of online developer communities like GitHub, Stack Overflow, and even Reddit. Participate in discussions, share your projects, and build your visibility. We can often find opportunities through these channels that can lead to a full-time gig at companies like The Trade Desk, Inc..
✨Explore Job Boards Specifically for Tech Roles
Keep your eyes peeled on job boards that focus on tech roles. Sites like TechCareers or Stack Overflow Jobs can often have listings for companies like The Trade Desk, Inc. that might not show up on broader job sites. Make it a habit to check these regularly, and don’t hesitate to apply directly through our website!
We think you need these skills to ace Senior Software Engineer - High Performance Computing (HPC)
Some tips for your application 🫡
Show off your coding skills:When applying for a software engineering role, it's super important to showcase your coding skills. Make sure your CV includes your tech stack, any relevant programming languages you’re comfortable with, and examples of projects you've worked on. If you have a GitHub profile, link it up! We love to see code in action.
Tailor your portfolio:For a full-time role, we’d expect to see some solid examples of your work in your portfolio. Make sure to include at least two or three projects that highlight your problem-solving skills and your ability to work with different technologies. Focus on the projects that are most relevant to the position at The Trade Desk, Inc..
Craft a killer cover letter:Your cover letter is your chance to stand out—make it personal! Explain why you want to work at The Trade Desk, Inc. and how your skills align with the role. Show us your passion for software development. We dig enthusiastic candidates who understand the value of collaboration and continuous learning!
Be clear and concise:When it comes to writing your CV and cover letter, clarity is key. Avoid jargon that could confuse us and stick to simple, direct language. Highlight your achievements with quantifiable results where possible, and keep everything easy to read. A well-organised application goes a long way!
How to prepare for a job interview at The Trade Desk, Inc.
✨Brush Up on Your Coding Skills
For a full-time software engineering role, it's crucial that we stay sharp with our coding abilities. Expect technical questions that might involve solving problems on the spot or discussing algorithms. Practise on platforms like LeetCode or HackerRank to get comfortable with the types of questions that often come up.
✨Know Your Tools and Frameworks
Make sure we’re well-acquainted with the tools and technologies listed in the job description. Familiarise ourselves with any specific frameworks or programming languages mentioned. If The Trade Desk, Inc. uses React or Node.js, for instance, be ready to discuss how we’ve used them in previous projects or coursework.
✨Showcase Your Projects
Bring along a portfolio that highlights our best work. This could be code samples, GitHub repositories, or any side projects we’ve built. Make sure we can talk through our thought process for each project, especially the challenges we faced and how we solved them—this shows our problem-solving skills in action.
✨Prepare for Behavioural Questions
While technical skills are key, full-time positions also require cultural fit. Be ready to discuss our previous experiences and how we handle teamwork, conflict, and deadlines. Brush up on the STAR method—Situation, Task, Action, Result—to clearly articulate our past experiences when discussing how we've contributed to a team.