Lead Staff 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 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.  

What you’ll do: 

It’s the best of both worlds. You will get a chance to exercise your technical leadership as well as building up your people management and leadership skills. Some of the work that you will be doing to help us deliver on our mission is: 

Technical leadership 

• Active reviewer of design and code reviews  

• Deliver meaningful technical and hands on contributions toward the team's objectives  

• Understand strategic business priorities and communicate with the team on how their work fits into the whole. 

Own 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 small team  

• Help team members develop career growth plans  

• Give regular and effective feedback  

• Hold weekly 1:1s with directs  

• Annual reviews & 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 a 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 that is not required in the following areas: distributed systems, building micro-services, knowledge of Kubernetes. 

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.