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
At The Trade Desk, we design and build custom solutions that extend our platform’s capabilities, with a focus on quality, reusability, and customer success. From client facing applications and backend services to data science models, workflow automation, reports, and large-scale data workflows, we deliver end-to-end systems that drive advanced campaign optimization, actionable analytics, and robust data operations at global scale.
We are a small, high impact team that strategically enables advertisers to unlock advanced capabilities, we solve unique partner needs, shape technical patterns that benefit the wider platform. Whether it’s enabling advanced bidding strategies, streamlining data pipelines, or creating bespoke reporting experiences, we build with quality and scale in mind.
We value a culture of collaboration, innovation, and learning. Here, engineers invent and simplify as they extend platform capabilities, striking the right balance between reusability and customization while partnering closely with clients and cross functional teams.
What you’ll do:
This role is ideal for someone passionate about building innovative, data-driven solutions in the programmatic advertising space. You thrive in a high-scale, data-intensive environment where client needs are diverse, and you will play a key role in designing reusable patterns and standardized components that accelerate future solution delivery. If you’re excited about enabling advertisers through tailored innovation and scalable platform extensions, we’d love to hear from you
In addition to the core responsibilities as Software Engineer, you will specifically:
- Drive architecture and design for end-to-end systems within Custom Solutions, influencing platform patterns and best practices across teams
- Develop custom APIs and backend services that integrate seamlessly with the core platform
- Optimize data storage, retrieval, and API performance for global-scale programmatic workloads
- Apply best practices in software engineering across the stack for scalability, maintainability, and resilience
- Create and maintain data processing workflows and automation solutions to support large-scale advertiser operations
- Collaborate with data scientists to integrate productionized models and algorithms into full-stack systems for advanced bidding and analytics
- Implement monitoring, logging, and observability across frontend and backend systems to maintain reliability and performance
- Design and build client-facing applications with responsive, intuitive UIs using frontend frameworks
- Identify opportunities to standardize patterns to accelerate future solution delivery
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:
- Deep experience designing and building large-scale, distributed systems across client-facing applications, backend services, and data workflows
- Proven ability to own architecture and technical direction for complex, end-to-end systems
- Strong knowledge of data processing frameworks and workflows, with experience scaling systems for data-intensive workloads
- Proficiency in one or more programming languages such as Python, Java, C#, or Scala
- Solid understanding of data modeling concepts and experience with relational and cloud data warehouses (e.g., Snowflake, Vertica)
- Familiarity with big data technologies (e.g., Apache Spark, Kafka) and best practices for building resilient, high-performance systems
- Track record of leading and completing projects with high levels of technical ambiguity while mentoring and growing peers
- Strong communication skills for aligning technical decisions with business priorities across technical and non-technical stakeholders
- A background with big data technologies
- Familiarity with full stack development is a plus technical skill set
- 11+ years of software development experience, with significant experience building and scaling production systems
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent experience
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.
#LI-AD
In accordance with various US state laws, the range provided is the Trade Desk's reasonable estimate of the base compensation for this role. The actual amount may differ based on non-discriminatory factors such as experience, knowledge, skills, and location. All employees may be eligible to become The Trade Desk shareholders through eligibility for stock-based compensation grants, which are awarded to employees based on company and individual performance. The Trade Desk also offers other compensation depending on the role such as variable compensation-based incentives and commissions. Plus, expected benefits for this role include comprehensive healthcare (medical, dental, and vision) with premiums paid in full for employees and dependents, retirement benefits such as a 401k plan and company match, short and long-term disability coverage, basic life insurance, well-being benefits, reimbursement for certain tuition expenses, parental leave, sick time of 1 hour per 30 hours worked, vacation time for full-time employees up to 120 hours thru the first year and 160 hours thereafter, and around 13 paid holidays per year. Employees can also purchase The Trade Desk stock at a discount through The Trade Desk’s Employee Stock Purchase Plan.
The Trade Desk also offers a competitive benefits package. Click here to learn more.
Note: Interns are not eligible for variable incentive awards such as stock-based compensation, retirement plan, vacation, tuition reimbursement or parental leave
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
- Deep experience designing and building large-scale, distributed systems across client-facing applications, backend services, and data workflows
- Proven ability to own architecture and technical direction for complex, end-to-end systems
- Strong knowledge of data processing frameworks and workflows, with experience scaling systems for data-intensive workloads
- Proficiency in one or more programming languages such as Python, Java, C#, or Scala
- Solid understanding of data modeling concepts and experience with relational and cloud data warehouses (e.g., Snowflake, Vertica)
- Familiarity with big data technologies (e.g., Apache Spark, Kafka) and best practices for building resilient, high-performance systems
- Track record of leading and completing projects with high levels of technical ambiguity while mentoring and growing peers
- Strong communication skills for aligning technical decisions with business priorities across technical and non-technical stakeholders
- 11+ years of software development experience, with significant experience building and scaling production systems
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent 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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