Senior Software Engineer - SRE - Site Reliability Engineer

The Trade Desk is a global technology company with a mission to create a better, more open internet for everyone through principled, intelligent advertising. Handling over 1 trillion queries per day, our platform operates at an unprecedented scale. We have also built something even stronger and more valuable: an award-winning culture based on trust, ownership, empathy, and collaboration. We value the unique experiences and perspectives that each person brings to The Trade Desk, and we are committed to fostering inclusive spaces where everyone can bring their authentic selves to work every day.

Do you have a passion for solving hard problems at scale? Are you eager to join a dynamic, globally- connected team where your contributions will make a meaningful difference in building a better media ecosystem? Come and see why Fortune magazine consistently ranks The Trade Desk among the best small- to medium-sized workplaces globally.

What we do

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.

At The Trade Desk, we believe in building the back-end infrastructure of our platform with a focus on quality at scale. This means whether we are building parts of our client-facing applications, internal custom solutions for our own team members, or model pipelines for bidding optimizations, we are making sure that we have infrastructure, development, and tools to do it right and efficiently.

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

Our approach to infrastructure is in the midst of an exciting transformation toward SOA and we need your help! Up until now we've grown to a massive scale via a centralized Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team. As embracers of change, we've decided that the best route forward is through smaller, focused teams. Now that we've decentralized, we're working on a building a large Platform-as-a-Service Kubernetes estate in our ever-expanding physical datacenter footprint as well as multiple cloud providers. Transformations are challenging but they provide multiple opportunities for a positive impact on a growing company. If this sounds like an exciting pursuit, we'd love to talk to you!

What you'll do:

Some of the work that you will be doing to help us deliver on our mission is:

As a Software Engineer with a specialization in Kubernetes you will:

• Provide solutions at scale for the infrastructure required to run a globally distributed system handling over 13 million requests per second.

• Help product teams ship more efficiently and safely through automation, tools, and processes which can be used by all teams at The Trade Desk.

• Ensure supportability by innovating solutions for our infrastructure through building, implementing, operating, and adding features to our heterogeneous Kubernetes ecosystem.

• Participate in root-cause analysis and postmortem discussions to effectively drive long-term operational health improvements.

• Analyze for process gaps and implement solutions to speed up execution and reduce manual toil.

• While not strictly a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) role, there are elements of the mindset that apply-- configuration management, capacity modeling, monitoring, data collection and analysis, key performance indicator definitions, and tracking.

• Participate in a 24/7 on-call rotation.

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:

• Experience writing clean, maintainable, and well-tested code in any of the following languages: Python, Go / Golang, Typescript, Ruby, or C#

• Designing, developing, deploying Kubernetes clusters in support of service-oriented applications

• Domain knowledge or a strong motivation to learn several of the following:

• Kubernetes Control Plane internals, addon extensions, scaling tools

• Provisioning and deployment tooling for Kubernetes

• Linux operating system internals, filesystems, storage technologies, protocols, and networking stack

• Private cloud operations at scale

• Experience with serverless infrastructure as a service is a huge plus, especially Kubernetes in traditional datacenters

Key Attributes

• Technical Contributions:

• An understanding of systems design, the advantages or drawbacks to various approaches.

• Experience building always-on systems, working across a variety of technologies and service layers.

• Uses a data driven approach to both daily time investments as well as long-term bets.

• Operationally Efficient:

• Operate in a way that reduces complexity and cuts operational risks with a solid grasp of costs and the return on investment-- of time, implementation, customer impact.

• A track record of making significant and self-directed, contributions to large and impactful projects.

• Actively communicate with your team as well as across the organization to effectively drive toward a unified goal.

• Practical problem solving, superb communication and documentation skills.

• An Empathetic, Objective, Critical Thinker:

• Thinking beyond the task at hand to deeply understand the 'why' behind an objective.

• Welcoming of ideas and understanding perspectives that are different from your own and an interest in seeking and building a common ground.

• You are a creative thinker, not bound by "the way things have always been done". You think of the questions nobody has thought of and might be hard to ask.

• What you know is less important than how well you learn, innovate, collaborate, and adapt.

• As a global team from many diverse backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives, you value and seek out paths for fostering diversity.

Variety of technical opportunity 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 don't need engineers who know all the answers; we need engineers who can invent the answers no one has thought of yet, to the questions yet to be asked.

The Trade Desk does not accept unsolicited resumes from search firm recruiters. Fees will not be paid in the event a candidate submitted by a recruiter without an agreement in place is hired; such resumes will be deemed the sole property of The Trade Desk. The Trade Desk is an equal opportunity employer. All aspects of employment will be based on merit, competence, performance, and business needs. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, marital status, age, national origin, ancestry, physical or mental disability, medical condition, pregnancy, genetic information, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, veteran status, or any other status protected under federal, state, or local law.

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NY, CO, CA, and WA residents only: In accordance with NY, CO, CA, and WA law, the range provided is The Trade Desk's reasonable estimate of the base compensation for this role. The actual amount may differ based on non-discriminatory factors such as experience, knowledge, skills, abilities, and location. All employees may be eligible to become The Trade Desk shareholders through eligibility for stock-based compensation grants, which are awarded to employees based on company and individual performance. The Trade Desk also offers other compensation depending on the role such as sales-based incentives and commissions. Plus, expected benefits for this role include 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, and 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.

The Trade Desk also offers a competitive benefits package. Click here to learn more.

Note: Interns are not eligible for variable incentive awards such as stock-based compensation, retirement plan, vacation, tuition reimbursement or parental leave

At the Trade Desk, Base Salary is one part of our competitive total compensation and benefits package and is determined using a salary range. The base salary range for this role is$102,400-$187,700 USD