Senior Software Engineer, Backend - Infra/Platform, VenturaOS
About The Position
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. 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. Ventura OS is a new Smart TV operating system being built inside The Trade Desk. Where the wider company runs a global-scale DSP, Ventura is closer to a startup inside it: a small team, direct influence over product direction, and a real OS shipping to real devices in real living rooms. We’re deliberately building the CTV supply chain differently: more efficient for advertisers and publishers, more relevant for viewers, and more transparent end-to-end. The backend that powers all of it is being built now, and the Infra team is the critical foundation for it.
Requirements
- 6+ years of software engineering experience, including meaningful time on cloud platforms or distributed systems.
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent experience
- A sustained track record of self-directed, end-to-end ownership of complex, high-impact projects — you think beyond the immediate task of understanding the "why."
- Strong engineering fundamentals and first-principles thinking. At our scale, many off-the-shelf tools and techniques don't work out of the box, and you can evaluate and adapt solutions to a unique environment.
- Commercial development experience in a modern backend language (Node.js/TypeScript, Java, Kotlin, Go, or C#).
- Extensive hands-on experience designing and operating cloud services and/or infrastructure in production, at a meaningful scale.
- Strong background in infrastructure-as-code and automation, and the discipline to get it right.
- Hands-on experience instrumenting production services for observability — metrics (e.g., Prometheus), structured logging, distributed tracing — and operating with SLO-driven, on-call rigor.
- Solid understanding of relational and NoSQL data stores (Postgres, MySQL, Redis, or similar), including safe tenant-scoped data modeling.
- Experience owning a shared platform that other engineering teams build on — codifying standards, running "paved paths," and driving adoption without disrupting partner teams' delivery.
- A track record of sound technical decision-making, with experience of mentoring engineers through code and design review.
- Strong communication skills with both technical and non-technical audiences, and comfort scoping and sequencing work under ambiguity.
Nice To Haves
- Deep understanding of cloud services and Kubernetes on AWS, GCP, or Azure at scale.
- Exposure to identity/security systems (authN/authZ, audit) in a production environment.
- Familiarity with GPU infrastructure or ML-serving platforms.
- Background in Smart TV, OTT, or CTV services — or on any infrastructure layer that backs up a hardware fleet or a consumer-facing OS.
Responsibilities
- Be an end-to-end owner of the systems this team runs — designing, building, operating, monitoring, and setting the standards other inherit.
- Be responsible for the scalability, performance, reliability, and visibility of every cloud service powering Ventura TV OS.
- Build, automate, and operate the compute (VMs, Kubernetes), networking (VPN, edge services), database (SQL/NoSQL), storage, and identity services every Ventura partner team depends on — using infrastructure-as-code and automation-first practices, and forecasting capacity needs ahead of demand for compute, storage, and GPU resources.
- Partner with application teams to design, implement, and scale the services and infrastructure behind their products.
- Own the identity, security, and compliance model for Ventura OS cloud services — authentication, authorization, audit, and adherence to security and compliance standards for every request, from internal employees to external partners.
- Monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize system performance and cost while balancing availability, efficiency, and cloud spend across the infrastructure we run.
- Deliver highly available build infrastructure (GitLab, Jenkins, Gerrit) and developer tooling relied on by internal engineers and external partner vendors alike.
- Own AOSP platform, client experience and mobile build systems, lab infrastructure, release pipelines, and shared platform-engineering tooling plus build, test, and deployment infrastructure for first- and third-party Ventura apps.
- Lead the GPU infrastructure and model-serving platforms behind applied science workloads and AI-assisted tools, including code review and incident-response automation.
- Own end-to-end telemetry infrastructure — client-side ingestion, processing pipelines, data warehousing, and analytics reporting with data privacy and governance built in by design.
- Drive major infrastructure and platform migrations, and lead adoption of new tools and standards across the org.
- Own operational excellence for every service we run — observability, SLOs, on-call, incident response, disaster recovery and business continuity planning, and the documentation and runbooks that keep teams resilient during handoffs.
Benefits
- 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
- 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.
- Stock-based compensation grants, which are awarded to employees based on company and individual performance.
- Variable compensation-based incentives and commissions.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
Associate degree
