Staff Product Manager, Data Platform

Description

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.

Who We Are

The Trade Desk has also built something beyond our technology: a culture grounded in trust, ownership, and the belief that ambitious, principled people can change an industry. We value intellectual honesty, diverse perspectives, and teams that push each other to do better work. We celebrate big bets, learn from failures, and care deeply about getting things right — for our customers and for each other. If that resonates with you, we'd love to talk.

Who We’re Looking For

Data is foundational to The Trade Desk: how our products work, how our customers understand their investments, and how we build what comes next. We’re looking for a Staff Product Manager to shape the data platform that makes that possible. This is an opportunity to influence the foundations behind a global advertising business, building capabilities that help teams across the company move faster, make better decisions, and deliver more value to customers.

The scale makes this work especially compelling. Across channels and markets, our products depend on large volumes of data being collected, processed, and made available accurately, reliably, and efficiently. The decisions we make about those foundations shape what other teams can build, how quickly they can build it, and how well it performs. You’ll help ensure our data platform stays ahead of the business’s needs as our products, customers, and ambitions evolve. AI and agents are also expanding who uses data and what they can do with it. As software increasingly discovers, interprets, and acts on data, our platform must serve new kinds of users and make new workflows possible. You’ll help shape that evolution: building trusted, discoverable, and securely accessible data capabilities that enable teams to create AI-native products and agent-driven experiences.

We’re looking for someone who combines technical depth with the ability to make a complex vision clear and compelling. You’re curious about where the business is going, comfortable working with senior leaders across functions, and skilled at finding the shared needs behind different roadmaps. You love building alongside engineers, care about the people who depend on your platform, and can turn a long-term vision into practical investments that deliver value along the way.

Responsibilities

• As a Staff Product Manager, you will lead product vision, strategy, and priorities for the data platform, working closely with engineering and the teams that depend on it. This is a senior individual contributor role with influence across the organization. Your work will connect business direction to platform capabilities, helping teams meet today’s commitments while building the foundations for the next several years.
• Set the vision and strategy for the data platform. Develop a clear point of view on how the platform needs to evolve and the opportunities it should enable. Translate that vision into a multi-year strategy and an actionable roadmap, with explicit priorities, tradeoffs, and measures of success.
• Understand where the business is heading. Build relationships with product, engineering, data science, and business leaders, including directors and VPs. Understand what they are planning this year, next year, and further ahead. Identify the data capabilities those plans depend on, surface gaps early, and bring a coherent view of future needs back to the platform team.
• Turn needs across teams into shared capabilities. Spend time with the engineers, data scientists, analysts, and product teams who produce and consume data. Understand their workflows and constraints, distinguish common problems from specialized needs, and prioritize investments that create value across the platform.
• Build the plan with engineering. Partner closely with engineering leaders on how data is ingested, processed, stored, discovered, and served. Write clear product vision and requirements documents, evaluate options together, and make informed tradeoffs across performance, reliability, flexibility, cost, and time to value.
• Earn alignment and champion the platform. Explain why platform investments matter in terms that resonate with technical teams and business leaders. Build compelling investment cases, make dependencies and tradeoffs visible, and align stakeholders around priorities. Help teams understand what the platform enables and how to use it effectively.
• Make trusted data easier to use. Partner with engineering and relevant governance and security teams to establish expectations for data quality, freshness, discoverability, access, and reliability. Advocate for clear interfaces, documentation, and self-service workflows that make the platform easier to adopt and build on.
• Deliver value throughout the journey. Break long-term investments into useful increments and coordinate dependencies, migrations, and adoption across teams. Balance new capabilities with improvements to existing foundations, keeping the roadmap responsive as business needs and technical understanding evolve.
• Measure the platform’s impact. Define success through the outcomes the platform enables: faster delivery of data-dependent products, shorter onboarding times, greater reuse, stronger reliability, and better cost efficiency. Combine usage data with feedback from platform users, and follow through when an investment falls short of expectations.
• What You Bring to the Table
• 6+ years of product management experience, including substantial experience building data platforms, infrastructure, or technical products at scale. You have led initiatives spanning multiple teams and carried them from strategy through delivery and adoption.
• Exceptional communication and organizational influence. You make complex technical ideas understandable without losing the details that matter. You write compelling strategy and requirements documents, explain the business value of foundational work, and build alignment with directors, VPs, and technical leaders. You can navigate competing priorities, challenge assumptions constructively, and drive decisions without formal authority.
• Experience setting a platform vision and strategy. You have translated needs across products or business areas into a coherent roadmap for shared capabilities. You can connect near-term decisions to a longer-term direction, distinguish durable needs from uncertain possibilities, and explain what to invest in now and what can wait.
• Deep technical fluency in data systems. You understand data ingestion, batch and streaming processing, storage and query systems, data modeling, APIs, and the implications of schema evolution and downstream dependencies. You can engage credibly with engineers on architecture and reason through tradeoffs involving throughput, latency, reliability, scalability, and cost.
• Hands-on fluency with data. You’re strong in SQL and comfortable exploring datasets, investigating quality issues, and using evidence to test assumptions. You understand how data definitions, granularity, lineage, and freshness affect the products and decisions built on top of them.
• A product mindset for internal platforms. You treat the teams using your platform as customers. You invest in understanding their work, care about developer experience and adoption, and recognize that a capability creates value when people can successfully use it.
• Strong judgment and independent execution. You bring structure to ambiguous problems, prioritize across competing needs, and work closely with engineering to deliver useful increments. You take responsibility for results and keep improving the product after launch.

Requirements

• A background in software engineering, data engineering, analytics engineering, or a similarly technical discipline.
• Experience with digital advertising, programmatic platforms, or other businesses where high-volume data systems are central to the product.
• Experience preparing data platforms for AI and agent-driven workflows, including making data discoverable, interpretable, and securely accessible to models and agents.
• Experience leading platform migrations, consolidating fragmented data systems, or evaluating when to build, buy, or extend foundational capabilities.
• [LA JOBS ONLY] The Trade Desk will consider qualified applicants with criminal histories for employment in a manner consistent with the requirements of the Los Angeles Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring, Ordinance No. 184652.
• [SF JOBS ONLY] Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.
• In accordance with various US state laws, the range provided is the Trade Desk's reasonable estimate of the base compensation for this role. The actual amount may differ based on non-discriminatory factors such as experience, knowledge, skills, and location. All employees may be eligible to become The Trade Desk shareholders through eligibility for stock-based compensation grants, which are awarded to employees based on company and individual performance. The Trade Desk also offers other compensation depending on the role such as variable compensation-based incentives and commissions. Plus, expected benefits for this role include comprehensive healthcare (medical, dental, and vision) with premiums paid in full for employees and dependents, retirement benefits such as a 401k plan and company match, short and long-term disability coverage, basic life insurance, well-being benefits, reimbursement for certain tuition expenses, parental leave, sick time of 1 hour per 30 hours worked, vacation time for full-time employees up to 120 hours thru the first year and 160 hours thereafter, and around 13 paid holidays per year. Employees can also purchase The Trade Desk stock at a discount through The Trade Desk’s Employee Stock Purchase Plan.
• The Trade Desk also offers a competitive benefits package. Click here to learn more.
• Note: Interns are not eligible for variable incentive awards such as stock-based compensation, retirement plan, vacation, tuition reimbursement or parental leave
• At the Trade Desk, Base Salary is one part of our competitive total compensation and benefits package and is determined using a salary range. The base salary range for this role is
• $201,400 - $251,800 USD
• 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.