Staff 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 platform operates at an unprecedented scale. We have also built something even stronger and more valuable: an award‑winning culture based on trust, ownership, empathy, and collaboration. We value the unique experiences and perspectives that each person brings to The Trade Desk, and we are committed to fostering inclusive spaces where everyone can bring their authentic selves to work every day.

Do you have a passion for solving hard problems at scale? Are you eager to join a dynamic, globally‑connected team where your contributions will make a meaningful difference in building a better media ecosystem? Come and see why Fortune magazine consistently ranks The Trade Desk among the best small‑to‑medium‑sized workplaces globally.

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 making sure that we have infrastructure, development, and tools to do it right and efficiently. 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 finding 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.

We have dozens of individual, 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. Staff 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

• Commercial development skills in OO programming (C#, Java or C++) and design.
• Cloud‑based platform experience (AWS, Azure or Aliyun).
• Excellent understanding of Agile development methodology and development practices.
• Experience in Agile Scrum tools (such as Jira).
• Understanding of designing web‑based, service‑oriented applications and integrated back‑office systems.
• Experience in distributed source control system (such as Git).

Key Attributes

• You have a sustained track record of making significant, self‑directed, and end‑to‑end contributions to large and impactful software projects.
• You think beyond just the task at hand to deeply understand the 'why' behind what you are doing.
• You understand engineering fundamentals. 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 a broadly skilled Technical Lead accustomed to developing web services.
• You have experience building always‑on systems, working across a variety of technologies and service layers.
• You have a product‑focused mindset.
• You have the passion and ability to contribute to the process of discovering what will delight our clients and push forward 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 senior engineers (Tech Leads) have deep knowledge and exercise a high degree of leadership in their daily work.
• You have strongly‑held, 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 quick to walk through fire to support your fellow teammates.
• You value, seek out, and foster diversity.
• You are a creative thinker, not bound by 'the way things have always been done'.

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. 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.