Senior Software Engineer - OpenPath

Senior Software Engineer - Open Path

The Trade Desk is a global technology company with a mission to create a better, more open internet for everyone through principled, intelligent advertising. Handling over 1 trillion queries per day, our platform operates at an unprecedented scale. We have also built something even stronger and more valuable: an award‑winning culture based on trust, ownership, empathy, and collaboration.

About Open Path – Open Path provides a direct, transparent connection between The Trade Desk and leading premium publishers, enabling efficient, objective, and high‑quality access to inventory for advertisers. By simplifying the programmatic supply chain and reducing intermediaries, Open Path brings supply‑path transparency, cost efficiency, and improved visibility into each impression’s value and source.

Objective – Open Path focuses on creating and managing direct integrations with publishers while providing a robust publisher platform. Unlike an SSP, The Trade Desk remains buy‑side focused—we do not optimize publisher yield or manage direct deals. Our mission is to deliver transparency and competition that lead to better outcomes for advertisers.

• Direct access to inventory from top publishers through The Trade Desk platform
• Infrastructure designed to integrate with transparent demand solutions, including Prebid’s open‑source header bidding
• Emphasis on supply‑path transparency, cost efficiency, and visibility into cost/value
• A buy‑side‑only approach supporting competition, innovation, and objective decision‑making

• Fewer supply chain hops and greater efficiency
• Objective evaluation of supply paths with no preferential treatment
• Increased transparency into cost drivers, supply sources, and impression value

As a Senior Software Engineer on the Open Path team, you will serve as a key technical leader responsible for architecting and building the systems that power direct publisher integrations and the publisher platform. You will work on highly impactful greenfield projects that shape the industry’s future—improving transparency, efficiency, and control across billions of impressions and dollars in programmatic spend.

• Architect and design scalable, high‑performance systems that enable direct publisher integrations and transparent supply paths
• Lead platform infrastructure efforts, including components that support Prebid header bidding and publisher tooling
• Drive key architectural decisions for greenfield codebases and next‑generation services

• Partner closely with product managers, data scientists, client services, data partnerships, inventory teams, and FP&A to translate business needs into technical solutions
• Develop and maintain the publisher platform that empowers publishers to manage their integrations
• Drive system performance improvements to support large datasets (e.g., 100% avails, user data) with high availability and low latency
• Mentor engineers across the team and elevate engineering practices
• Champion an iterative, fail‑fast culture—rapidly prototyping, learning, and evolving solutions
• Set and uphold technical standards for distributed systems, reliability, and platform development

• Backend: C#, Scala, Go
• Frontend:
  React, Redux, Type Script, Puppeteer, Jest
• Data: SQL, Spark
• Databases: SQL Server, Vertica, Aerospike
• Infrastructure:
  Docker, Kubernetes

• Software Engineers with proven experience building and scaling large distributed systems
• Strong architectural instincts and ability to design systems for reliability, performance, and scale
• A technical leader with experience mentoring engineers and leading cross‑team initiatives
• Deeply curious about the business and passionate about using technology to transform outcomes
• Comfortable operating in ambiguity, iterating quickly, and pivoting when needed
• Collaborative and energized by working across multiple teams and disciplines
• Motivated by transparency, simplicity, and building principled systems
• Experience with high‑scale, real‑time systems or platform development is a strong plus