The Trade Desk
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, their platform operates at an unprecedented scale. They have also built something even stronger and more valuable: an award-winning culture based on trust, ownership, empathy, and collaboration.
The Role
As a Senior Software Engineer on the OpenPath team, you will serve as a key technical leader responsible for architecting and building the systems that power direct publisher integrations and the publisher platform. You will work on highly impactful greenfield projects that shape the industry's future—improving transparency, efficiency, and control across billions of impressions and dollars in programmatic spend.
Responsibilities
- Architect and design scalable, high-performance systems that enable direct publisher integrations and transparent supply paths
- Lead platform infrastructure efforts, including components that support Prebid header bidding and publisher tooling
- Drive key architectural decisions for greenfield codebases and next-generation services
- Partner closely with product managers, data scientists, client services, data partnerships, inventory teams, and FP&A to translate business needs into technical solutions
- Develop and maintain the publisher platform that empowers publishers to manage their integrations
- Drive system performance improvements to support large datasets with high availability and low latency
- Mentor engineers across the team and elevate engineering practices
- Champion an iterative, fail-fast culture—rapidly prototyping, learning, and evolving solutions
- Set and uphold technical standards for distributed systems, reliability, and platform development
Requirements
- Proven experience building and scaling large distributed systems
- Strong architectural instincts and the ability to design systems for reliability, performance, and scale
- Technical leadership experience mentoring engineers and leading cross-team initiatives
- Curiosity about the business and passion for using technology to transform outcomes
- Comfort with ambiguity, iteration, and pivoting as needed
- Collaborative nature and ability to work across multiple teams and disciplines
- Motivation by transparency, simplicity, and building principled systems
- Experience with high-scale, real-time systems or platform development is a strong plus
Benefits
- Massive business impact: Influence billions in ad spend and reshape how premium inventory is accessed
- Extreme scale: Work with high-volume publisher integrations, 100% avails, user data, and real-time systems
- Broad technical exposure: Touch multiple services across the company—from publisher integrations to demand-side infrastructure
- Deep cross-functional engagement: Collaborate closely with engineering, product, data science, operations, and commercial teams
- Greenfield development: Build several new services and platforms from the ground up
- Innovation culture: Help define the future of transparent, efficient supply paths in programmatic advertising
- Modern technology stack: Build cutting-edge services and lead the evolution toward agile architectures