Systems Operations Engineer

About the role

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.

As a Systems Operations Engineer, you will act as a technical expert and advisor to more junior engineers. You’ll monitor platform services and stability via telemetry and alerts, triage issues, escalate to engineering teams as needed, and collaborate with development teams to facilitate issue remediation. You’ll also proactively update and improve documentation, runbooks, and incident response processes while defining and measuring relevant metrics. There may be periodic weekend coverage requirements.

Responsibilities

• Monitor the state of platform services and stability via telemetry and alerts at an escalated tier
• Triage issues and escalate to engineering teams as needed
• Work collaboratively with development teams to facilitate issue remediation
• Manage remediation task workflow
• Proactively update and improve Systems Operations documentation and runbooks
• Increase the effectiveness of the incident response process by defining and measuring relevant metrics

Requirements

• Undergraduate degree or relevant substitute experience
• 6+ years of relevant work experience in Technical and/or Application Support with strong knowledge of services support and troubleshooting

Skills

• Technical Proficiency:
  • Understanding of large-scale distributed system architectures (e.g., databases, web services, application services)
  • Familiarity with monitoring tools (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Nagios)
  • Ability to configure and fine-tune alerts
  • Proficiency or ability to learn programming languages including SQL, Python, and C# to automate repetitive tasks
• Incident Management and Troubleshooting:
  • Ability to prioritize and manage incidents based on severity, with a focus on customer impact
  • Ability to remain calm under pressure and quickly diagnose issues
  • Understanding of system logs, metrics, and telemetry
• Communication Skills:
  • Ability to communicate effectively with stakeholders during an incident
  • Clear and concise documentation skills
  • Ability to maintain and update troubleshooting guides (TSGs) and operational documentation
  • Ability to translate complex technical issues and platform outages to non-technical stakeholders

About the team

At The Trade Desk, we recognize that a seamless customer experience is driven by operational excellence. In pursuit of constantly improving the reliability of our platform, we have established a global Systems Operations team. This team's core mission is to vigilantly monitor The Trade Desk platform services, refine our incident response methodologies, and guarantee a robust and highly-available customer experience.

Pay

The base salary range for this role is $64,100—$117,500 USD. Base salary is one part of our competitive total compensation and benefits package and is determined using a salary range. All employees may be eligible to become The Trade Desk shareholders through 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
• Basic life insurance
• Well-being benefits
• Reimbursement for certain tuition expenses
• Parental leave
• Sick time: 1 hour per 30 hours worked
• Vacation time: up to 120 hours through 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

Note: Interns are not eligible for variable incentive awards such as stock-based compensation, retirement plan, vacation, tuition reimbursement, or parental leave.