Backend Engineer, Ads Platform

Meet Fetch Engineering

At Fetch, engineering is driven by curiosity, ownership, and a bias toward action. We operate in complex problem spaces where the right answer is not always clear, and success depends on adaptability, critical thinking, and informed decision-making. Our engineers are comfortable navigating ambiguity, understanding tradeoffs, gathering context, and turning uncertainty into progress while maintaining high technical standards.

Engineers at Fetch take pride in building reliable, scalable systems that serve millions of users. You will contribute directly to the codebase, collaborate closely with cross-functional partners, and help shape best practices that elevate the quality of our work. We foster a culture of mentorship and collaboration, where engineers grow by learning from one another and holding a high bar for quality, reliability, and impact.

Fetch is building the next generation of systems that power personalized advertising experiences for millions of users, and we're looking for a Staff Backend Engineer to help design and evolve the backend systems behind them. You will build and scale the high-throughput, low-latency distributed systems that sit on the critical path of Fetch's advertising platform, powering real-time decisions and experiences under demanding requirements for latency, availability, correctness, efficiency, and operational resilience.

At Fetch, Staff means impact well beyond a single team. You set technical standards that multiple teams adopt, architect across multiple services and domains for company-wide programs, and define multi-quarter initiatives that shape the direction of the broader Ads organization and the Platform, Data, and ML teams it depends on. You are the person who resolves the high-ambiguity, team-spanning problems others get stuck on, and you lead through technical influence and mentorship rather than formal authority.

The role requires deep expertise in distributed systems and backend architecture, along with a track record of solving difficult performance and scaling problems in production. You should be comfortable reasoning about systems operating at high request volumes, identifying bottlenecks across the stack, and designing architectures that continue to perform as traffic, data volume, and product complexity grow.

This is a high-impact role at the intersection of distributed systems, real-time decisioning, and monetization, where performance, reliability, and operational excellence are non-negotiable. You will work closely with Ads, Product, Platform, Data, and ML teams to build scalable foundations that let Fetch move quickly while holding a high bar for system quality.

This is a full-time role that can be held from one of our US offices or remotely in the United States.

• Own architecture across critical Ads services. Design the high-throughput, low-latency services behind ad selection, targeting, pacing, delivery, attribution, and measurement, including the calls on partitioning, caching, consistency, concurrency, and performance across multiple services and domains.
• Design for reliability, resilience, and operational excellence. Build systems that degrade gracefully under partial failures, traffic spikes, and downstream degradation, with the metrics, tracing, SLOs, and alerting that give clear visibility into revenue-generating systems.
• Evolve event-driven and data-intensive architectures. Design reliable data flows across transactional and non-transactional stores, streaming, messaging, caching, and real-time processing, balancing consistency, durability, latency, scalability, and operational complexity.
• Set standards multiple teams adopt. Drive backend, reliability, and performance standards across Ads and adjacent teams, and build reusable services and patterns that cut duplication and accelerate development.
• Drive engineering leverage. Lead significant refactoring, migration, and system-health work, and build shared infrastructure and patterns that improve the group's velocity and reliability.
• Shape org-level technical direction. Define and deliver multi-quarter initiatives that shape Ads-org direction and influence org-level priorities, and carry technical direction for the group when needed.
• Solve high-ambiguity, team-spanning problems. Resolve complex reliability, performance, and scalability problems that span multiple teams, and partner across Ads, Platform, Product, Data, and ML to…