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.
Who we are
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
At The Trade Desk, we believe that each opportunity to engage with all internal and external stakeholders is unique. This means you will have the opportunity, based on your interests and background, 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.
Our system performs all day, every day, serving global traffic. We build distributed systems in a highly collaborative environment, utilizing a broad range of technologies to solve algorithmic, optimization, and scale challenges.
What you’ll do:
As a Senior Engineer on this team, you will lead the design and evolution of our feed definitions, ensuring they remain performant across a complex multi-cloud environment.
You will tackle the challenge of unifying diverse ingest and egress paths while maximizing code reusability and minimizing latency—even as data volumes surge. Beyond the code, you will empower stakeholders by driving self-service provisioning and increasing the flexibility of our platform.
You will also play a key role in our culture, fostering an inclusive environment where diverse perspectives are welcomed to build better technical solutions.
Who you are:
Our culture is much deeper than just having fun together (though we do that well, too). We take pride in our engineers being trust-builders, generous givers, scrappy problem solvers, and gritty pursuers of excellence. You do not have to meet all the requirements below, but we believe that people who meet most of them will have a higher likelihood of succeeding in this role:
- You are comfortable working on an agile, distributed team spanning multiple time zones and continents.
- You can communicate effectively across both technical and non-technical audiences.
- You have a solid understanding of computer science and engineering fundamentals.
- You have strong experience working with distributed systems.
- You have expertise in a backend programming language such as C#, Java, or Go.
- You have 7+ years of software development and engineering experience.
- You have experience using Spark, GraphQL, Vertica, Snowflake or Databricks (or similar data platform technologies)
- You have experience in the following nice-to-have areas: building microservices, Cloud, Kubernetes, and Kafka.
A variety of technical opportunities 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 are not seeking engineers who know all the answers; we need engineers who can invent answers no one has thought of yet and find answers to the questions yet to be asked
As an Equal Opportunity Employer, The Trade Desk is committed to creating an inclusive hiring experience where everyone has the opportunity to thrive.
Please reach out to us at accommodations@thetradedesk.com to request an accommodation or discuss any accessibility needs you may require to access our Company Website or navigate any part of the hiring process.
When you contact us, please include your preferred contact details and specify the nature of your accommodation request or questions. Any information you share will be handled confidentially and will not impact our hiring decisions.
Skills Required
- Strong understanding of computer science and engineering fundamentals
- Strong experience working with distributed systems
- Expertise in a backend programming language such as C#, Java, or Go
- 7+ years of software development and engineering experience
- Experience using Spark, GraphQL, Vertica, Snowflake, Databricks, or similar data platform technologies
- Experience working on agile, distributed teams across multiple time zones and continents
- Effective communication with technical and non-technical audiences
- Experience building microservices
- Cloud experience
- Kubernetes experience
- Kafka experience
The Trade Desk Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about The Trade Desk and has not been reviewed or approved by The Trade Desk.
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Affordable Benefits — Healthcare premiums are often paid in full for employees and dependents, reducing out-of-pocket costs. Coverage includes medical, dental, and vision alongside mental health and wellness support.
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Equity Value & Accessibility — Packages commonly include new-hire stock grants, a generous Employee Stock Purchase Plan, and equity refreshers tied to performance. Feedback suggests equity meaningfully boosts total compensation alongside base pay and bonuses.
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Leave & Time Off Breadth — Generous PTO, paid holidays, paid sick time, and sabbaticals are available. Paid parental leave and extensive family-planning support broaden time-off and caregiving coverage.
The Trade Desk Insights
What We Do
The Trade Desk is changing the way global brands and their agencies advertise to audiences around the world. Our mission is to transform media for the benefit of humankind. Our media-buying platform helps brands deliver a more insightful and relevant ad experience for consumers — and sets a new standard for reach, accuracy, and transparency.
Why Work With Us
With up to 11 million queries per second and SLAs in the milliseconds, we’re tackling data and software challenges at massive scale. While we’re growing fast, investing in our value based company culture remains one of our top priorities. If you’re talented, driven, and hungry to bring something entirely new and wildly ambitious, let's talk.
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