Staff Software Engineer – Agentic AI in London

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 have the opportunity to participate in many aspects of designing, building, and delivering data‑focused products for our stakeholders. At The Trade Desk, we believe in building the back‑end infrastructure of our platform with a focus on quality at scale. This means whether we are building parts of our client‑facing applications, internal custom solutions for our own team members, or model pipelines for bidding optimizations, we are ensuring our infrastructure, development, and tools are right and efficient. Our system performs all day, every day serving global traffic. We build a distributed system in a highly collaborative environment, utilizing a broad range of technologies. Our back‑end developers work on solutions to algorithmic, optimization, and scale challenges in everything we do.

What you’ll do

• You will participate actively in all aspects of designing, building, and delivering products for our clients.
• Develop with a variety of platforms and technologies, such as Docker, Kubernetes, Gitlab, AWS, Azure, Aliyun, .NET Core, Java, Scala, SQL Server, GraphQL.
• Participate in design reviews and proof of concepts.
• Contribute to solution design in line with our overall technical roadmap and industry best practices.
• 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.
• As a Staff Engineer, contribute to team growth through mentoring, technical leadership, and/or direct management of small teams, raising the bar for those around you.

Who you are

• Commercial development skills with OO programming (C#, Java or C++) and design.
• Cloud‑based platform experience (AWS, Azure or Aliyun).
• Excellent understanding of Agile development methodology and practices.
• Experience with Agile Scrum tools such as Jira.
• Understanding of designing web‑based, service‑oriented applications and integrated back‑office systems.
• Experience with distributed source control systems such as Git.
• Sustained track record of making significant, self‑directed, and end‑to‑end contributions to large software projects.
• Ability to think beyond the task, deeply understand the “why” behind what you are doing.
• Understanding of engineering fundamentals and ability to work from first principles to evaluate and adapt solutions to our unique environment.
• Broadly skilled Technical Lead accustomed to developing web services.
• Experience building always‑on systems across a variety of technologies and service layers.
• Product‑focused mindset.
• Passion and ability to contribute to discovering client delights and advancing the industry toward openness, transparency, and evidence‑based decision making.
• Confidence and humility, working without ego.
• Strong leadership, able to advocate for what you believe is right, evaluate trade‑offs, and support teammates.
• Commitment to diversity and inclusive teamwork.

Equal Opportunity Statement

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.