The Trade Desk
Lead Staff Software Engineer
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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
Our 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 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. It’s important we focus on quality at scale in an agile environment that is 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 gaining efficiency.
The SCORE team owns the backend health, performance, and reliability of a core part of The Trade Desk's platform, including the APIs that power how internal and external systems interact with our product at significant scale, and the systems that generate and deliver scheduled reports and near-real-time campaign performance metrics from massive datasets. We're responsible for the full lifecycle of these systems: operational health, ongoing modernization, and enforcing quality standards across the services we own.
Our scope is also growing into the infrastructure behind AI agents, including data scanning and caching systems built to serve agentic use cases. It's a high-stakes, high-visibility part of the platform, and we're looking for someone excited to help shape where it goes next. We also partner closely with other engineering teams and platform-wide governance groups on shared standards and reliability. This role is based in our London office.
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What you’ll do
Some of the work that you will be doing to help us deliver on our mission is:
Technical leadership
- Design, build, and operate backend systems supporting a high-traffic web and data platform, as a Staff-level technical authority on the team.
- Act as a technical reviewer and mentor in design and code reviews, raising the engineering bar for the team.
- Drive technical direction on ambiguous, cross-cutting problems, balancing reliability, performance, and delivery speed.
- Partner with adjacent teams and platform governance groups to align on shared standards and systems.
People leadership & management
- Ramp up on our systems and technical domain first. From there, you'll take on direct management of a senior engineer, with a short runway to grow into leading a larger engineering team as we scale headcount in London.
- This role is a deliberate growth track toward people management. We're looking for someone who actively wants to build and lead a team over time, not someone content to stay purely IC indefinitely.
- Once you're managing, you'll run regular 1:1s, own performance and growth conversations, and take part in hiring as the team scales.
- Represent your team's technical direction and staffing needs in cross-functional planning.
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 operate at a Staff engineer level, a recognized technical authority that other engineers turn to for guidance on hard problems.
- You have hands-on experience building and operating backend systems for a web or data platform of meaningful scale.
- Experience with C#/.NET and SQL is a strong plus, though not required. What matters most is depth with backend systems generally.
- Experience designing or building GraphQL and/or REST APIs is a plus.
- Experience with reporting or scheduled-reporting systems is a plus.
- Experience building AI or agentic systems is a plus.
- You're actively seeking a path into people management, not just willing to tolerate it. You can point to some experience mentoring, leading, or informally guiding other engineers already.
- You operate independently in ambiguity, scoping, sequencing, and driving execution on complex backend problems without much hand-holding.
- You communicate clearly with engineers and non-technical stakeholders alike, including around trade-offs and risk.
- You take ownership of what you build in production, not just what you ship.
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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.
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.
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