Software Engineer, VenturaOS - Content Discovery & Search

The Trade Desk is a global technology company and the world’s leading independent platform for digital advertising, with over 3,000 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.

We're a small, high-impact team building a next-generation TV operating system. Our flexible structure gives engineers direct influence over product direction—an opportunity rarely found in larger companies.

Our public API stack is Type Script, while many backend systems leverage Java, Python, Aerospike, and PostgreSQL. We prioritize problem-solving, scalable architecture, security expertise, and innovation over specific tech stacks.

Our Staff Engineers are end-to-end owners. As a member of Content Discovery and Search team, you will be responsible for the design, implementation, and optimization of content discovery and search systems within Ventura TV OS cloud services. Your work will directly impact how users discover and interact with content across the platform, ensuring a seamless, high-quality experience.

• Partner with application teams to design, build, and scale content discovery and search features that cater to user needs while ensuring performance, relevancy, and scalability.
• Work on processing and understanding content to enhance personalization mechanisms, improving the user experience by delivering the most relevant and engaging content.
• Build and manage high-performance, low-latency search systems capable of handling large and diverse content catalogs, ensuring efficient indexing, fast queries, and relevant results.

We are seeking a highly motivated software engineer with a passion content discovery and personalization:

• You have a sustained track record of making significant, self-directed, and end-to-end contributions to large and impactful software projects. You think beyond just the task at hand to deeply understand the 'why' behind what you are doing.
• You understand engineering fundamentals. At our scale, many off-the-shelf techniques and existing technologies (open source and enterprise) simply don't work. You are able to work from first principles to evaluate solutions and adapt them to a unique environment.
• You understand modern data-intensive systems, have hands‑on experience with distributed data processing, data indexing, building ML inference and re‑training frameworks. You are also passionate about discovering personalized and relevant data to improve system effectiveness and user experience.
• Experience with search systems such as Open Search or Elasticsearch, including indexing, query performance, ranking, relevance tuning, and search quality evaluation, is desirable.
• Experience building recommendation and personalization systems, including candidate retrieval, ranking, and integrating model outputs into production services, is desirable.
• Experience with distributed data processing frameworks such as Apache Spark and platforms such as Databricks,…