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 Lead Staff 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 that each opportunity to engage with consumers is unique. User experience can make or break our business. This means our users must have all the flexibility to harness our system’s growing power and present meaningful insight from the petabytes of data streaming through our platform with unparalleled ease.
Our system performs every day, 24/7, serving global traffic. We deliver features to improve our clients' abilities to make real-time decisions and troubleshoot campaigns with simple-to-use interfaces and high-performance data interactions. To improve our users’ day-to-day lives, we collaborate closely with user experience and product management organizations to ensure consistent, modern designs as well as the right balance of requirements. Our frontend developers work up and down the stack (client to server) to deliver these world-class experiences.
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 is:
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 large initiatives and roadmaps.
- Drive complex changes involving multiple components.
- Deliver quality changes, including automated tests, metrics, and monitoring.
- Collaborate with cross-functional team members to deliver features, including contributing to development of comprehensive success criteria,
- 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 are comfortable working on an agile, distributed team spanning multiple time zones and continents.
- You are able to communicate effectively across both technical and non-technical audiences.
- You have a solid understanding of computer science and engineering fundamentals.
- You are passionate about building beautiful and seamless user interfaces.
- You have love for, and desire to advance, the state of the art of technology.
- You are proficient in JavaScript/TypeScript.
- You have experience building enterprise level services.
- 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 have 11+ years of software development engineering experience.
- 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: languages/technology on the server-side (C#, Java, NodeJS, SQL), knowledge of front-end frameworks (React/Redux).
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.
In accordance with various US state laws, the range provided is the Trade Desk's reasonable estimate of the base compensation for this role. The actual amount may differ based on non-discriminatory factors such as experience, knowledge, skills, and location. All employees may be eligible to become The Trade Desk shareholders through eligibility for stock-based compensation grants, which are awarded to employees based on company and individual performance. The Trade Desk also offers other compensation depending on the role such as variable compensation-based incentives and commissions. Plus, expected benefits for this role include comprehensive healthcare (medical, dental, and vision) with premiums paid in full for employees and dependents, retirement benefits such as a 401k plan and company match, short and long-term disability coverage, basic life insurance, well-being benefits, reimbursement for certain tuition expenses, parental leave, sick time of 1 hour per 30 hours worked, vacation time for full-time employees up to 120 hours thru the first year and 160 hours thereafter, and around 13 paid holidays per year. Employees can also purchase The Trade Desk stock at a discount through The Trade Desk’s Employee Stock Purchase Plan.
The Trade Desk also offers a competitive benefits package. Click here to learn more.
Note: Interns are not eligible for variable incentive awards such as stock-based compensation, retirement plan, vacation, tuition reimbursement or parental leave
At the Trade Desk, Base Salary is one part of our competitive total compensation and benefits package and is determined using a salary range. The base salary range for this role is
$137,300—$251,800 USD
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.
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