Lead Staff Software Engineer

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate high-traffic backend systems as a Staff-level technical authority.
• Drive technical direction for ambiguous, cross-cutting problems, balancing reliability and performance.
• Act as a technical reviewer and mentor to raise the engineering bar through design and code reviews.
• Transition into people management, initially managing a senior engineer before scaling to lead a larger team.
• Own the full lifecycle of systems, including operational health, modernization, and quality standards.
• Partner with adjacent teams and platform governance groups to align on shared standards.

Requirements

• Proven experience operating at a Staff Engineer level as a recognized technical authority.
• Hands-on experience building and operating backend systems for large-scale web or data platforms.
• A strong desire to pursue a people management career path rather than remaining a pure individual contributor.
• Ability to operate independently in ambiguous environments, scoping and driving execution on complex problems.
• Excellent communication skills for interacting with both engineers and non-technical stakeholders.
• Strong sense of ownership regarding production stability and system reliability.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with C#/.NET and SQL.
• Experience designing or building GraphQL and/or REST APIs.
• Background in building reporting, scheduled-reporting, or near-real-time metric systems.
• Experience building AI or agentic systems.

About the Company

The Trade Desk is a global technology company and the world’s leading independent platform for digital advertising. Our technology helps advertisers reach the right audiences across the open internet—from streaming TV and podcasts to mobile apps and news. We solve massive technical challenges, from processing petabyte-scale datasets in real time to building reliable global distributed systems.