Lead Senior Software Engineer

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

Our Lead Senior Software Engineers are end-to-end owners who have the opportunity to participate in many aspects of designing, building, and delivering data-focused products for our stakeholders. 

At The Trade Desk, we believe in building the back-end infrastructure of our platform with a focus on quality at scale. This means whether we are building parts of our client-facing applications, internal custom solutions for our own team members, or model pipelines for bidding optimizations, we are making sure that we have infrastructure, development, and tools to do it right and efficiently.

Our system performs all day, every day serving global traffic. We build a distributed system in a highly collaborative environment, utilizing a broad range of technologies. Our back-end developers work on finding solutions to algorithmic, optimization and scale challenges in everything we do.

What you’ll do:

Some of the work that you will be doing to help us deliver on our mission is:

The Data Platform team is responsible for enabling the business to create powerful and efficient insights from data. In this role you will be working cross functionally with data engineers, data analysts, solution architects and business intelligence to design and implement optimized datasets that accelerate innovation. This team will also be responsible for building the framework and guardrails to make sure our datasets are high quality, compliant, and stable. Lastly you will be systemically identifying and implementing fundamental improvements to how we utilize data while fostering a culture of continuous improvement and innovation.

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 are a strong communicator. You’re able to identify and build robust datasets that provides value to multiple functions
• You have a passion for making large scale systematic improvements
• You are an expert in building and tuning large scale data pipelines in Spark
• Experience building complex data pipelines in Airflow is a plus
• You have a sustained track record of leading engineers with a wide range of experience, while also 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 & your team are doing.
• You are a driver. You will be driving technical projects and providing leadership in a ground-breaking and fast-paced environment. This includes task planning and conducting code reviews, as well as individual code contribution.
• 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.
• 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.

Variety of technical opportunity 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 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. 

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 an agreement 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.

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