Lead Staff Software Engineer

Job Description

The Trade Desk is a global technology company with a mission to create a better Internet for everyone through principled, intelligent advertising.

Handling over 600 billion queries per day (more than 100X the query volume of search globally), our platform operates at unprecedented scale. We have also built something even stronger and more valuable: an award-winning culture based on trust, empathy, collaboration, and ownership. By working together across typical dividing lines, we are better as a team than any of us could be apart.

Do you have a passion for solving hard problems at scale? Are you eager to join a trust-based, globally-connected team, where your contributions will make a meaningful difference?

About the Role:

• Our Senior Engineers are end-to-end owners. You will participate actively in all aspects of designing, building, and delivering products for our clients.
• 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.
• Senior 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.

Who We Are Looking For:

• 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 engineer, 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. We look for awesome engineers from all different backgrounds (C#, Java, C++, Scala, Ruby, Python.. and if you have worked with two or more of these... even better!)
• You work with confidence and without ego. Our engineers 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. We are a global team from many diverse backgrounds, with different experiences and perspectives. To complement this team, you will welcome ideas that are different from your own and be skilled at finding and building from common ground.
• 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.

What We Care About:

What and how you can contribute is what’s important to us. Our consideration is not limited by the kind of education you have or the specific technologies you have experience with. Variety of technical challenge is one of the best things about working at The Trade Desk as an engineer, but 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 solve complex problems using the best tools for the job.

Our culture runs much deeper than just having fun together (though, we do that well too...) – the people we want on our team are trust-builders, generous givers, scrappy problem solvers, and gritty pursuers of excellence.

Does this sound like you? If so, we welcome your application and the chance to meet you.

The Trade Desk does not accept unsolicited resumes from search firm recruiters. Fees will not be paid in the event a candidate submitted by a recruiter without a contract in place is hired; such resumes will be deemed the sole property of The Trade Desk. 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.