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Software Engineer II

Our 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.

You will join the Contextual Marketplace team, responsible for powering the next generation of contextual intelligence at The Trade Desk. Our work spans both critical platform capabilities and innovative product experiences, including:

  • Integrations 3rd-party contextual data providers
  • A robust contextual marketplace enabling advertisers to build complex contextual strategies
  • Our internal contextual classification systems

As a key contributor to this team, you will help drive transformational product and platform changes, such as:

  • Advanced troubleshooting and observability tools to keep the marketplace healthy and transparent
  • New co-pilot and guided workflow experiences that make campaign setup smarter and faster
  • Agentic automation that adapts bidding and targeting in real time
  • Ensuring our core solutions remain reliable, performant, and built to scale

Our system performs every day, 24/7, serving global traffic. We build a distributed system in a highly collaborative environment, utilizing a broad range of technologies. Our developers work on finding solutions to algorithmic, optimization, and scale challenges in everything we do.

What you’ll do:

You will sharpen your technical prowess by contributing to the projects listed above. Some of the work that you will be doing to help us deliver on our mission is:

  • Design, build, deliver, and own full lifecycle development software from inception to production
  • Demonstrate a firm grasp of the entire software development lifecycle
  • Drive complex changes involving multiple components
  • Deliver quality changes, including automated tests, metrics, and monitoring
  • Collaborate with team members to deliver features
  • Guide and review changes to product features in line with product roadmaps
  • Implement and maintain product features
  • Validate changes to ensure high quality product releases
  • Work in a distributed system environment
  • Understand the business objectives behind the code
  • Understand system architecture fundamentals through self-directed learning
  • Lead others through example, mentorship, teaching, and/or participate in hiring activities

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 have experiences working with distributed systems.
  • You are proficient in one or more of the following programming languages: C#, Java, C, C++, Python, SQL, or Scala.
  • You have some knowledge of software development code editors: Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, Rider, and version control systems (Git, Perforce).
  • You have 2+ 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:

  • Database engines (Microsoft SQL Server, Postgres, Aerospike, Vertica, Redis), building micro-services, operating systems and cloud, Kubernetes, Kafka.

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. 

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.