Lead Staff Software Engineer

What we do

Our Lead Staff Software Engineers are end-to-end owners who will participate in all aspects of designing, building, and delivering data-focused products for our stakeholders. 

At The Trade Desk, we believe that each opportunity to engage with all internal and external stakeholders is unique. This means that based on your interests and background, you will have the opportunity to work on large-scale, distributed systems, for example, 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 every day, 24/7, serving global traffic. It’s important that we focus on quality at scale in an agile environment based on collaboration, ownership, and trust. Our software engineering teams fully own their charter to work on long-term roadmaps while enhancing existing features or tools and continuously improving efficiency.

You will join the Contextual Marketplace team, responsible for powering the next generation of contextual intelligence at The Trade Desk. Our work spans both critical platform capabilities and innovative product experiences, including:

• Integrations with leading 3rd-party contextual data providers
• A robust contextual marketplace enabling advertisers to build complex contextual strategies
• Our internal contextual classification systems

You will play an important role in transformational product and platform changes, such as:

• Advanced troubleshooting and observability tools to keep the marketplace healthy and transparent
• New co-pilot and guided workflow experiences that make campaign setup smarter and faster
• Agentic automation that adapts bidding and targeting in real time
• Ensuring our core solutions remain reliable, performant, and built to scale

What you’ll do:

It’s the best of both worlds - you'll get a chance to exercise your technical leadership and build up your people management and leadership skills. Some of the work that you will be doing to help us deliver on our mission includes the following:

Technical leadership

• Actively review design and code.
• Deliver meaningful technical and hands-on contributions to the team's objectives.
• Understand strategic business priorities and communicate with the team on how their work fits into the roadmap.

Project level processes and execution

• Collaborate with the PM (product management) team to develop the roadmap and MVP plans.
• Develop execution plans (resources, milestones, and timelines) for the roadmaps.
• Continuously analyze and optimize team efficiency.
• Establish and deliver on team commitments.
• Measure and maintain/improve the quality of the team's contributions.
• Communicate important developments and changes to area leadership and other stakeholders.

People management

• Manage a small team.
• Help team members develop career growth plans.
• Give regular and effective feedback.
• Hold weekly 1:1 meetings with direct reports.
• Annual reviews and compensation recommendations.

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:

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 have a solid understanding of SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle), DevOps, and agile methodologies.
• You have a solid understanding cloud computing.
• You have a solid understanding of design patterns and software architecture design patterns.
• You have experience in contributing to professional growth of software engineers.
• You have experience in providing technical and project leadership of initiatives involving multiple teams.
• You have experience in leading and completing projects with a high degree of technical ambiguity.
• You have experience in working with non-technical stakeholders.
• You have experience in hiring and conducting interviews.
• You are proficient in one or more of the following programming languages: C#, Java, C, C++, Python, SQL, Scala, Typescript/JavaScript.
• You have 11+ years of software development engineering experience.
• You have 1+ years of experience directly managing people.
• You have a Bachelor’s/Master’s level degree in computer science or relevant engineering-related field or equivalent experience. Not everyone has the same level of access to opportunities. What is most important to us is what and how you can contribute, which is why our consideration is not limited by the level of education you have.
• You have additional nice-to-have experience in the following areas: distributed systems, building micro-services, knowledge of Kubernetes.

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.