Software Engineer II

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 the Team:

The Service Excellence (SE) team owns the tools and infrastructure that help engineers at The Trade Desk understand and operate production systems. The Monitoring & Observability (MOT) taskforce focuses on the observability systems. The team is responsible for the observability platform — metrics, logs, traces, alerting, and dashboards — used across TTD engineering.

What you will work on:

• Metrics platform — Build and operate the metrics platform that ingests, stores, and serves time-series data for every engineering team at TTD.
• Distributed tracing — Help engineers find the needle in the haystack with OTel pipelines, trace sampling, and Honeycomb.
• Alert quality tooling — Build the systems that give engineers better signal and less noise — smarter routing, better grouping, tighter feedback loops between alerts and the teams that own them

Who you are:

• Curiosity about how production systems work — some exposure to deploying, operating, or debugging real services.
• Willingness to work across the stack — the role touches distributed systems, Kubernetes, observability pipelines, and web-based tooling, and you'll pick up what you don't know yet.
• Familiarity with observability concepts: logging, alerting, on-call workflows
• A debugging mindset — you're the kind of person who likes figuring out why something broke.
• Clear communication — the team works closely with engineers across the company, and you'll explain what you're doing and ask for help when you need it.

Plus skills:

• Experience with observability tools and infrastructure
• Experience with Kubernetes
• Experience with Agentic engineering

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.

As an Equal Opportunity Employer, The Trade Desk is committed to creating an inclusive hiring experience where everyone has the opportunity to thrive.

Please reach out to us at accommodations@ thetradedesk. com to request an accommodation or discuss any accessibility needs you may require to access our Company Website or navigate any part of the hiring process.

When you contact us, please include your preferred contact details and specify the nature of your accommodation request or questions. Any information you share will be handled confidentially and will not impact our hiring decisions.