Staff Software Engineer, VenturaOS - Content Discovery & Search

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:

We're a small, high-impact team building a next-generation TV operating system. Our flexible structure gives engineers direct influence over product direction—an opportunity rarely found in larger companies.

Our public API stack is TypeScript, while many backend systems leverage Java, Python, Aerospike, and PostgreSQL. We prioritize problem-solving, scalable architecture, security expertise, and innovation over specific tech stacks.

Responsibilities

• Our Staff Engineers are end-to-end owners. As a member of Content Discovery and Search team, you will be responsible for the design, implementation, and optimization of content discovery and search systems within Ventura TV OS cloud services. Your work will directly impact how users discover and interact with content across the platform, ensuring a seamless, high-quality experience.
• Partner with application teams to design, build, and scale content discovery and search features that cater to user needs while ensuring performance, relevancy, and scalability.
• Work on processing and understanding content to enhance personalization mechanisms, improving the user experience by delivering the most relevant and engaging content.
• Build and manage high-performance, low-latency search systems capable of handling large and diverse content catalogs, ensuring efficient indexing, fast queries, and relevant results.

Requirements

• We are seeking a highly motivated software engineer with a passion content discovery and personalization:
• You have a sustained track record of making significant, self-directed, and end-to-end contributions to large and impactful software projects. You think beyond just the task at hand to deeply understand the 'why' behind what you are doing.
• You understand engineering fundamentals. At our scale, many off-the-shelf techniques and existing technologies (open source and enterprise) simply don't work. You are able to work from first principles to evaluate solutions and adapt them to a unique environment.
• You understand modern data-intensive systems, have hands-on experience with distributed data processing, data indexing, building ML inference and re-training frameworks. You are also passionate about discovering personalized and relevant data to improve system effectiveness and user experience.
• Experience with search systems such as OpenSearch or Elasticsearch, including indexing, query performance, ranking, relevance tuning, and search quality evaluation, is desirable.
• Experience building recommendation and personalization systems, including candidate retrieval, ranking, and integrating model outputs into production services, is desirable.
• Experience with distributed data processing frameworks such as Apache Spark and platforms such as Databricks, including content ingestion, transformation, feature generation, and pipelines supporting search and recommendations, is desirable.
• You work with confidence and without ego. Our engineers have deep knowledge and exercise a high degree of leadership in their daily work. You have strongly-held, defensible ideas, and advocate for what you believe is right. You will welcome ideas that are different from your own, are also adept at identifying and evaluating trade-offs, willing to be proven wrong, and quick to walk through fire to support your fellow teammates.
• What We Care About:
• What and how you can contribute is what’s important to us. Our consideration is not limited by the kind of education you have or the specific technologies you have experience with. Variety of technical challenge is one of the best things about working at The Trade Desk as an engineer, but 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 solve complex problems using the best tools for the job.
• 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
• $137,300 - $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.