Lead Staff Software Engineer - Partner Platform

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.

About the role

You’ll provide technical leadership for The Trade Desk’s partner-facing platform, shaping its vision and architectural roadmap. This role involves hands-on contributions across TypeScript/React front ends and C#/.NET GraphQL services, as well as defining standards for schema consistency, security, observability, and scalability. You’ll simplify the partner journey from onboarding to optimization, turning shared needs into reusable platform services and components. Your work will guide cross-team decisions on schema governance, tooling, and architecture, balancing usability, reliability, and delivery speed.

Responsibilities

• Define the technical vision and architectural roadmap for The Trade Desk’s partner-facing platform.
• Lead the design of a scalable platform spanning federated GraphQL, RESTful APIs, SDKs, modular micro-frontends, integration workflows, developer tools, and polished web experiences.
• Make hands-on contributions through prototypes, production code, architecture reviews, and code reviews across TypeScript/React front ends and C#/.NET GraphQL services.
• Establish standards for schema/API consistency, backward compatibility, authorization, security, privacy, reliability, observability, Kubernetes-based operations, and SQL data modeling.
• Simplify the partner journey from discovery and onboarding through testing, certification, launch, and ongoing optimization.
• Turn shared needs across advertisers, data providers, publishers, and sellers into reusable platform services and front-end components.
• Guide cross-team decisions on schema governance, platform tooling, and architecture, balancing usability, scalability, reliability, security, privacy, and delivery speed.
• Partner with Product Management, Design, and engineering teams to shape the roadmap, technical approach, and delivery priorities.
• Break down ambiguous, cross-team problems into clear technical plans, milestones, dependencies, and risks.
• Drive alignment across teams that contribute to or consume the platform, communicating technical decisions and trade-offs clearly.
• Define and improve measures of platform health and partner success, including integration time, adoption, API reliability, and developer experience.
• Promote high standards for production readiness, operational ownership, and continuous improvement.
• Raise the engineering bar through thoughtful design and code reviews, technical mentorship, and practical guidance.
• Coach engineers in system design, debugging, delivery, and operating services in production.
• Lead by example as a trusted, hands-on technical partner who helps teams solve difficult problems and make durable decisions.
• Foster a collaborative, inclusive environment where engineers share knowledge, challenge assumptions constructively, and take ownership of outcomes.

Requirements

• A sustained record of leading complex, high-impact software initiatives from definition through production operation.
• Experience acting as a Staff-level technical authority while remaining hands-on with the codebase.
• Experience leading engineers with different levels of experience and helping senior engineers and technical leads grow.
• Experience leading initiatives involving several engineering and business teams, particularly where shared platform decisions affected teams outside your immediate organization.
• Ability to turn an ambiguous product vision into a coherent architecture and an executable delivery plan.
• Strong knowledge of distributed systems, cloud platforms, service-oriented architecture, and modern software delivery practices.
• Experience designing durable APIs — GraphQL (including federation and schema evolution), REST, or event-driven integration interfaces.
• Experience in modern frontend development: TypeScript, React, component-driven architecture, and data-rich single-page applications, ideally at monorepo scale.
• Proficiency in C# and TypeScript/JavaScript, and comfort with SQL and relational data modeling (SQL Server or similar).
• Understanding of the needs of developers integrating with an external platform, including authentication/authorization, documentation, testing, versioning, observability, and supportability.
• Ability to evaluate technical trade-offs involving usability, scalability, reliability, security, privacy, and delivery speed.
• Effective communication with engineers, product leaders, commercial stakeholders, and external partners.
• Leadership with confidence and low ego, advocating for well-reasoned decisions while inviting competing perspectives.
• Significant professional software engineering experience, typically 10 or more years, or an equivalent record of technical impact.
• Experience directly managing engineers or a clear record of comparable people leadership.
• A degree in computer science or a related discipline, or equivalent practical experience.

Skills

• Building developer platforms, app marketplaces, or self-service onboarding systems.
• Developing full-stack applications and data-rich partner experiences with React and .NET (or comparable stacks).
• Working with federated GraphQL (Apollo Federation, HotChocolate, or similar) and schema governance across multiple teams.
• Building or operating micro-frontend architectures and large frontend monorepos with modern build tooling (Bazel, pnpm workspaces, webpack/Vite).
• Creating public APIs, SDKs, technical documentation systems, sandboxes, or automated certification tooling.
• Working with identity, authorization, consent, data governance, or privacy-sensitive systems (e.g., UID2/EUID, persona-based access control, or entitlement systems).
• Operating distributed services on Kubernetes and containers across multiple public clouds (AWS and Azure), with relational databases, feature-flag and experimentation systems, and modern observability tooling (Prometheus, New Relic, OpenTelemetry, or similar).
• Working in advertising technology or with publishers, data providers, measurement partners, retailers, brands, or agencies.
• Using AI-assisted experiences to improve documentation discovery, integration support, or developer productivity.

Pay

The base salary range for this role is $137,300—$251,800 USD. The actual amount may differ based on non-discriminatory factors such as experience, knowledge, skills, and location. All employees may be eligible for stock-based compensation grants, awarded based on company and individual performance. Additional compensation may include variable incentives and commissions, depending on the role.

Benefits

• Comprehensive healthcare (medical, dental, and vision) with premiums paid in full for employees and dependents.
• Retirement benefits, including a 401k plan with company match.
• Short- and long-term disability coverage and basic life insurance.
• Well-being benefits and reimbursement for certain tuition expenses.
• Parental leave, sick time (1 hour per 30 hours worked), and vacation time (up to 120 hours in the first year and 160 hours thereafter for full-time employees).
• Around 13 paid holidays per year.
• Ability to purchase The Trade Desk stock at a discount through the Employee Stock Purchase Plan.