Staff Software Engineer - User Trail

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. If you're driven to solve meaningful challenges, we'd love to meet you.

What we do

The User Trail team owns the analytics and observability platform that captures how people actually use The Trade Desk's products - things like page views, clicks, and other interactions across our core web applications. This event data flows into our data platform and powers everything from product analytics to an AI-powered internal tool our team built, which lets people across the company investigate what happened in the platform in plain language instead of digging through logs by hand. That tool has become a genuine business asset: it's helped support and trading teams give clients clear, evidence-backed answers about what happened in their accounts, and we're actively extending access so teams beyond engineering - including business and commercial teams - can explore this data themselves without needing to write a query. We work closely with teams across the company to make sure the right signals are captured and easy to query. This is a growth investment for the team: as more products and teams come to rely on our data, we need someone who can help set technical direction across multiple parts of the platform, not just execute within one.

What you'll do:

• Help set the technical direction for how we unlock our data for the rest of the company - from self-service tools and dashboards to the AI-powered assistant our team built - not just how we collect and store it.
• Solve complex, multi-layered problems that span multiple areas of the platform, where your judgment on tradeoffs (e.g. how broadly to open up access, how much to invest in self-service vs. bespoke support) is relied on broadly.
• Anticipate problems and scaling needs several steps ahead of obvious requirements, as more teams across the company come to depend on our data and tools.
• Proactively identify and drive improvements not just to what the team ships, but to how the team works - tooling, process, and quality practices.
• Influence decision-making within the team by weighing in with a strong, ROI-driven perspective on which capabilities matter most to the teams we serve.
• Develop and share expertise across multiple areas of the platform, and act as a resource other engineers - on and off the team - can turn to for guidance.
• Partner directly with the teams building on top of our data - support, trading, business, and product - to shape what gets built next and how it's exposed.

Who you are:

Our culture is much deeper than just having fun together (though, we do that well too...). We take pride in our engineers being trust-builders, generous givers, scrappy problem solvers, and gritty pursuers of excellence. You do not have to meet all the requirements below, but we believe that people who meet most of them will have a higher likelihood of succeeding in this role:

• You have a track record of solving hard, ambiguous technical problems end-to-end, and you're comfortable being the person a team turns to when something spans multiple systems.
• You have deep expertise in backend services and/or data-intensive systems (e.g. event pipelines, data warehouse/lakehouse platforms, or SDK development), and you're able to apply that expertise across more than one area.
• You think in terms of return on investment - you can weigh technical tradeoffs against business impact and communicate that reasoning clearly to others.
• You're a change agent: you don't just solve the problem in front of you, you look for ways to improve how the team works and proactively push those changes forward.
• You communicate effectively with a range of stakeholders, from engineers to non-technical partners, and you