Senior Software Engineer - OpenPath

The Trade Desk is a global technology company and the world’s leading independent platform for digital advertising, with nearly 4,000 employees across more than 30 offices. Our technology helps advertisers reach the right audiences across the open internet — from streaming TV and podcasts to mobile apps, news, and more.  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. When you work here, your impact is worldwide. We welcome diverse perspectives, encourage curiosity, and build teams that learn from one another. If you’re driven to solve meaningful challenges, we’d love to meet you.About OpenPath 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. Purpose: 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. Key Features: Direct access to inventory from top publishers through The Trade Desk platform Infrastructure designed to integrate with transparent demand solutions, including Prebid’s open-source header bidding Emphasis on supply path transparency, cost efficiency, and visibility into cost/value A buy-side-only approach supporting competition, innovation, and objective decision-making Benefits for Advertisers: Fewer supply chain hops and greater efficiency Objective evaluation of supply paths with no preferential treatment Increased transparency into cost drivers, supply sources, and impression value The Role: As a Senior Engineer on the OpenPath team, you will serve as a key technical leader responsible for architecting and building the systems that power direct publisher integrations and the publisher platform. You will work on highly impactful greenfield projects that shape the industry’s future—improving transparency, efficiency, and control across billions of impressions and dollars in programmatic spend. What You Will Do: Technical Leadership & Architecture: 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 Execution & Collaboration: 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 Leadership & Influence: 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 Who You Are: 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 Technologies We Use: Backend: C#, Scala, Go Frontend: React, Redux, TypeScript, Puppeteer, Jest Data: SQL, Spark Databases: SQL Server, Vertica, Aerospike Infrastructure: Docker, Kubernetes Who Won’t Enjoy Working on OpenPath: Engineers who want purely technical challenges without business context Anyone uncomfortable with failing fast, discarding ideas, or pivoting quickly People who prefer rigid structures and slow-moving development cycles Individuals that take work too seriously and don’t enjoy a fun, collaborative environment Why OpenPath Is a Team to Be a Part of: Massive business impact: Influence billions in ad spend and reshape how premium inventory is accessed Extreme scale: Work with high-volume publisher integrations, 100% avails, user data, and real-time systems Broad technical exposure: Touch multiple services across the company—from publisher integrations to demand-side infrastructure Deep cross-functional engagement: Collaborate closely with engineering, product, data science, operations, and commercial teams Greenfield development: Build several new services and platforms from the ground up Innovation culture: Help define the future of transparent, efficient supply paths in programmatic advertising Modern technology stack: Build cutting-edge services and lead the evolution toward agile architectures Position Impact OpenPath is a major strategic initiativ