At a Glance
- Tasks: Lead a team to manage and optimise systems at scale using cutting-edge technologies.
- Company: The Trade Desk, a global leader in digital advertising technology.
- Benefits: Competitive salary, inclusive culture, and opportunities for professional growth.
- Other info: Join a diverse team that values creativity and collaboration.
- Why this job: Make a worldwide impact while working with next-gen hardware and innovative solutions.
- Qualifications: Experience with Linux and a passion for troubleshooting and performance engineering.
The predicted salary is between 80000 - 100000 £ 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.
We are looking to hire a Lead Systems Reliability Engineer to join our engineering team to continue building and maintaining our data‑driven platform. We leverage technologies like Aerospike, MongoDB, and Kafka to perform many real‑time activities, translating to a p99 latency under 1 millisecond on the back end! Do you enjoy tuning, performance testing, troubleshooting, automation, and operating at scale? Does testing next‑gen hardware, evaluating data access patterns, and designing automation around distributed systems excite you?
What makes this role different
- First in the Industry: The Trade Desk is the first company to run over 5MM QPS to NVMe in Aerospike on a single node, forcing core software redesigns to achieve this scale.
- Work on Cutting‑Edge Hardware: Design clusters with nodes featuring 300TB of NVMe, 3TB RAM, and 512 cores, delivering a global 2,500GB/s throughput directly from flash.
- Shape the Future of Infrastructure: Spec your own systems and collaborate directly with AMD and NoSQL vendors to run PoCs and optimize bleeding‑edge technology for internet‑scale workloads.
- Deep Performance Engineering: Dive into kernel, hardware, and system interactions, leveraging tools like flamegraphs, NUMA counters, BIOS tuning, and synthetic testing to achieve world‑class performance.
- Push Hardware Endurance Limits: Build clusters engineered to withstand over 1 zettabyte of endurance.
What you’ll do
- Lead a team to influence, manage, and plan work streams, systems, and data structures at scale within a global ecosystem, spanning multiple infrastructure providers (cloud and traditional datacenters).
- Encourage, improve, and build infrastructure automation in a way that works with stateful systems at scale.
- Own operations for Linux‑based systems running Aerospike, Kafka, and Mongo.
- Serve as a point of contact to review new use cases, answer questions, and participate in on‑call rotation.
- Learn to be a NoSQL SME. You do not need experience to apply – we will train you.
- Benchmark and analyze next generation hardware offerings.
Who you are
Skills and Experience
- Linux operating system
- Leadership experience and ability to mentor
- Troubleshooting Techniques for isolation, scientific method
- Identify bottlenecks (Is it CPU? IO?)
Nice‑To‑Have experience:
- Physical hardware (on‑prem) internals, management, and operation
- Performing testing and tuning
- Databases (relational or NoSQL)
- Ansible/PyInfra/Chef
- Prometheus
- Kubernetes
- Python/Ruby/Rust/Bash/Golang/C#
An Empathetic, Objective, Critical Thinker
Thinking beyond the task at hand to deeply understand the 'why' behind an objective. A welcoming of ideas, and understanding of, perspectives that are different from your own and an interest in seeking and building from a common ground. You are a creative thinker, not bound by "the way things have always been done" but are thinking of the questions nobody has thought of and are "yet to be asked". What you know is less important than how well you learn, innovate, collaborate, and adapt. As a global team from many diverse backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives, you value and seek out paths for fostering diversity.
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.
Lead Staff Systems Reliability Engineer (Linux & Distributed Systems) in London employer: Thetradedesk
The Trade Desk is an exceptional employer that fosters a culture of innovation and collaboration, making it an ideal place for a Lead Staff Systems Reliability Engineer. With access to cutting-edge technology and the opportunity to work on global-scale challenges, employees are encouraged to grow through mentorship and diverse perspectives. The company's commitment to inclusivity and employee development ensures that every team member can thrive in a supportive environment while making a meaningful impact in the digital advertising space.
