Staff Python Engineer

About the Role

Our Ad Sales Engineering organization builds the technical backbone that enables advertisers to plan, deliver, optimize, and monetize campaigns across a massive, multi-platform landscape. This role sits at the intersection of ad delivery (Trafficking) and revenue realization (Billing) – two mission-critical domains that directly impact company revenue. We are looking for a Staff Python Engineer to provide technical leadership across both:

• Trafficking Systems – the real-time backbone that powers ad delivery and pacing across platforms.
• Billing & Finance Platforms – the source of truth for revenue calculation, reconciliation, reporting, and financial integrity.

This is a rare opportunity to influence the entire ad lifecycle – from campaign ingestion to impression delivery to revenue recognition. You will shape architecture, modernize legacy systems, and drive event-driven, cloud-native transformation across both domains. This role is ideal for a hands-on technical leader who:

• Thinks in distributed systems.
• Understands revenue-critical pipelines.
• Thrives in cross-team influence.
• Wants ownership over systems that directly move business metrics.
• Brings in AI stewardship.

What You'll Do

• Lead the design and development of highly scalable and maintainable ASP services powering ad delivery across multiple platforms.
• Architect and evolve the Slingshot platform toward modern, event-driven, and cloud-native paradigms.
• Own end-to-end delivery – from system design and implementation to deployment, monitoring, and optimization.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with Product, Data Engineering, DevOps, and SRE teams to deliver robust ad-serving capabilities.
• Partner with Data and ML teams to enable intelligent ad selection, pacing optimization, and automated anomaly detection.
• Champion observability and reliability, ensuring high availability and operational excellence through Datadog, Grafana, and modern CI/CD practices.
• Mentor and guide engineers across teams, fostering a culture of technical rigor, innovation, and continuous improvement.
• Influence the long-term technology roadmap, aligning engineering investments with SiriusXM's strategic ad tech goals.

What You'll Need

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Deep expertise in Python (Django, FastAPI, or similar frameworks) and backend architecture, including async programming and microservice design.
• Strong background in distributed systems and data pipelines, with experience using tools like Celery, Kafka, or Airflow.
• Experience integrating with ad servers or delivery platforms (e.g., Google Ad Manager, AdsWizz, Triton).
• Hands-on experience with AWS and Kubernetes, including infrastructure automation and service scaling.
• Solid understanding of observability tools (Datadog, Sentry, Grafana) and CI/CD workflows.
• Proven success in driving cross-team technical initiatives, mentoring engineers, and influencing architecture at an organizational level.
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent industry experience.
• Must have legal right to work in the U.S.

Pay

Base salary range of $106,600 to $200,000, depending on skills, qualifications, and experience. Additionally, this role might be eligible for discretionary short-term and long-term incentives.