Lead Staff Software Engineer

• →Design, build, and operate backend systems supporting a high-traffic web and data platform, as a Staff-level technical authority on the team.
• →Act as a technical reviewer and mentor in design and code reviews, raising the engineering bar for the team.
• →Drive technical direction on ambiguous, cross-cutting problems, balancing reliability, performance, and delivery speed.
• →Partner with adjacent teams and platform governance groups to align on shared standards and systems.

• Ramp up on our systems and technical domain first. From there, you'll take on direct management of a senior engineer, with a short runway to grow into leading a larger engineering team as we scale headcount in London.
• This role is a deliberate growth track toward people management. We're looking for someone who actively wants to build and lead a team over time, not someone content to stay purely IC indefinitely.
• Once you're managing, you'll run regular 1:1s, own performance and growth conversations, and take part in hiring as the team scales.
• Represent your team's technical direction and staffing needs in cross-functional planning.

We are a global team with different backgrounds, experiences and perspectives. To complement this team, you will welcome ideas that are different from your own and be well-versed in building from common ground to value, seek out, and foster invisible and visible dimensions of diversity. 

Who you are: 

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: 

• You operate at a Staff engineer level, a recognized technical authority that other engineers turn to for guidance on hard problems.
• You have hands-on experience building and operating backend systems for a web or data platform of meaningful scale.
• Experience with C#/.NET and SQL is a strong plus, though not required. What matters most is depth with backend systems generally.
• Experience designing or building GraphQL and/or REST APIs is a plus.
• Experience with reporting or scheduled-reporting systems is a plus.
• Experience building AI or agentic systems is a plus.
• You're actively seeking a path into people management, not just willing to tolerate it. You can point to some experience mentoring, leading, or informally guiding other engineers already.
• You operate independently in ambiguity, scoping, sequencing, and driving execution on complex backend problems without much hand-holding.
• You communicate clearly with engineers and non-technical stakeholders alike, including around trade-offs and risk.
• You take ownership of what you build in production, not just what you ship.

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.  

The Trade Desk does not accept unsolicited resumes from search firm recruiters. Fees will not be paid in the event a candidate submitted by a recruiter without an agreement in place is hired; such resumes will be deemed the sole property of The Trade Desk. The Trade Desk is an equal opportunity employer. All aspects of employment will be based on merit, competence, performance, and business needs. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, marital status, age, national origin, ancestry, physical or mental disability, medical condition, pregnancy, genetic information, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, veteran status, or any other status protected under federal, state, or local law.