Senior Software Engineer - Machine Learning

Overview

What we do:

At The Trade Desk, we design and build custom solutions that extend our platform’s capabilities, focusing on quality, reusability, and customer success. We deliver end-to-end systems that drive advanced campaign optimization, actionable analytics, and robust data operations at global scale. We value collaboration, innovation, and learning, and engineers invent and simplify to extend platform capabilities while partnering with clients and cross functional teams.

This role is ideal for someone passionate about building innovative, data-driven solutions in the programmatic advertising space. You thrive in a high-scale, data-intensive environment where client needs are diverse, and you will play a key role in designing reusable patterns and standardized components that accelerate future solution delivery. We’re looking for a Senior Software Engineer who combines deep software engineering expertise with strong statistical and data analysis skills to lead the development of data-driven systems and solutions.

This role blends software engineering excellence, machine learning development, and production-grade MLOps – ideal for someone who enjoys bridging the gap between model experimentation and deployment  ll work closely with data scientists, ML engineers, and product teams to develop ML pipelines, optimize data workflows, automate deployment processes, and ensure that machine learning models deliver real-world value reliably and efficiently.

• Drive architecture and design for end-to-end systems within Custom Solutions, influencing platform patterns and best practices across teams
• Develop custom APIs and backend services that integrate seamlessly with the core platform
• Optimize data storage, retrieval, and API performance for global-scale programmatic workloads
• Apply best practices in software engineering across the stack for scalability, maintainability, and resilience
• Create and maintain data processing workflows and automation solutions to support large-scale advertiser operations
• Collaborate with data scientists to integrate productionized models and algorithms into production-ready systems for advanced bidding and analytics
• Design and optimize large-scale data pipelines supporting ML workflows
• Establish and enforce Engineering and MLOps best practices across our teams
• Implement monitoring, logging, and observability across frontend and backend systems to maintain reliability and performance
• Identify opportunities to standardize patterns to accelerate future solution delivery

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:

• Deep experience designing and building large-scale, distributed systems across client-facing applications, backend services, and data workflows
• Proven ability to own architecture and technical direction for complex, end-to-end systems
• Strong knowledge of data processing frameworks and workflows, with experience scaling systems for data-intensive workloads
• Strong experience developing, testing, and optimizing predictive models and statistical algorithms
• Expertise in big data processing and analytics frameworks — including tools like Apache Spark, Kafka, Airflow, Hadoop, Snowflake, and distributed data storage systems (S3, Big Query, Redshift, or Delta Lake)
• Proficiency in one or more programming languages such as Python, Java, C#, or Scala
• Experience deploying ML frameworks (Tensor Flow, PyTorch) for large-scale data pipelines
• Strong communication skills for aligning technical decisions with business priorities across technical and non-technical stakeholders
• 7+ years of software development experience, with significant experience building and scaling production systems
• Solid foundation in statistics, optimization and experience applying statistical methods to real-world data
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science,…