Sr Backend Engineer

Taboola•Los Angeles, CA

5d•$165,000 - $185,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Realize your potential by joining the leading performance-driven advertising company and a proud Great Place to Work® Certified employer in the US! As a Senior Backend Engineer working on the R&D Team in Downtown Los Angeles, utilizing some of the latest technology and tools, you will contribute to building and improving Taboola’s recommendation infrastructure. You will work on the backend services that drive Realize — Taboola's performance advertising platform serving 600M+ daily active users. This team is crucial for Taboola’s cookie-less future and the services you build directly influence campaign performance and revenue outcomes for publishers and advertisers worldwide.

Requirements

Bachelor's or advanced degree in a relevant field, ideally Computer Science, Engineering, or similar.
5+ years of hands-on Java coding and experience with the Spring Framework.
Strong understanding of database and search/serving concepts, with experience in relational, NoSQL (e.g., MySQL, Cassandra).
Experience with big data processing and analytics tools (e.g., Apache Spark, Hadoop, Google BigQuery).
Experience with containerization and orchestration tools (Docker, Kubernetes).
Experience with modern version control systems (specifically Git).
Thorough understanding of backend integration concepts, microservices architecture, RESTful APIs, and event-driven messaging (e.g., Kafka, web services).
Experience building and scaling real-time search, recommendation, or vector-search pipelines (specifically using Vespa or similar technologies like Elasticsearch/Solr).
System-architecture mindset — ability to design scalable, reliable, high-performance systems.
Experience taking end-to-end ownership of systems—using AI-assisted tools (e.g., Cursor, Claude, Codex).
Ability to communicate technical findings clearly, and to collaborate effectively across teams (including early morning or evening syncs with our Tel Aviv team).
Experience supporting production systems, including participating in on-call rotations, troubleshooting live issues, and driving root-cause fixes.

Nice To Haves

Experience developing models, algorithms and infrastructure to support large-scale data-mining and machine learning systems.
Experience in Python coding.

Responsibilities

Be a builder and problem solver - work closely with our Product team and architects to reach optimal technology solutions.
Work in a SCRUM environment designing, coding, and managing integration projects from conception to completion.
Develop highly scalable backend services and robust data processing pipelines to handle billions of high-throughput events and terabytes of data daily.
Take end-to-end ownership to design, build, measure, and maintain complex backend systems. Use AI coding assistants as force multipliers for rapid prototyping, feature delivery, and troubleshooting, grounded in strong engineering discipline and rigorous code review.
Mentoring junior or mid-level developers.
Own the health of your services in production: monitor performance, respond to incidents, lead root-cause analysis, and make improvements that keep Taboola services and system reliable at scale.