Senior Software Engineer - OpenPath
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. OpenPath provides a direct, transparent connection between The Trade Desk and leading premium publishers—enabling efficient, objective, and high-quality access to inventory for advertisers. By simplifying the programmatic supply chain and reducing intermediaries, OpenPath brings supply path transparency, cost efficiency, and improved visibility into each impression’s value and source. OpenPath focuses on creating and managing direct integrations with publishers while providing a robust publisher platform. Unlike an SSP, The Trade Desk remains buy-side focused—we do not optimize publisher yield or manage direct deals. Our mission is to deliver transparency and competition that lead to better outcomes for advertisers.
Requirements
- A Senior-level Engineer with proven experience building and scaling large distributed systems
- Strong architectural instincts and the ability to design systems for reliability, performance, and scale
- A technical leader with experience mentoring engineers and leading cross-team initiatives
- Deeply curious about the business and passionate about using technology to transform outcomes
- Comfortable operating in ambiguity, iterating quickly, and pivoting when needed
- Collaborative and energized by working across multiple teams and disciplines
- Motivated by transparency, simplicity, and building principled systems
- Experience with high-scale, real-time systems or platform development is a strong plus
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 (e.g., 100% avails, user data) 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
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
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
