Staff Software Engineer (Demand Bidder, Ad Serving Platform)

Join our team as a Staff Software Engineer, where you'll play a key role in scaling and evolving our Demand Bidder platform. This high-throughput system is critical to our next phase of growth, and you'll have the opportunity to take ownership of key initiatives, design and build core components, and mentor other engineers. With a focus on real-time distributed decision-making, you'll work closely with engineers and applied scientists to continuously evolve the system and tooling. Enjoy a range of benefits, including unlimited paid time off, medical and wellness benefits, and work-from-home opportunities.

• Design, build, and operate core components of a large-scale, real-time distributed decisioning system with strict latency requirements.
• Take end-to-end ownership of specific subsystems: architecture, implementation, testing, deployment, on-call, and long-term evolution.
• Mentor other engineers and raise the bar on engineering rigor, testing discipline, and operational excellence across the team.
• Experience evolving and refactoring live, business-critical systems without compromising uptime or correctness
• Deep prior experience isn't required — genuine curiosity and a willingness to help shape how the team uses these tools responsibly are what matters most
• Comfort operating in cloud infrastructure (GCP or AWS) at scale
• Strong command of Java, with a solid foundation in algorithms, data structures, concurrency/multi-threading, and performance optimization
• Real-time bidding / ad-tech domain experience is a big plus, but deep experience in adjacent high-stakes, low-latency domains (trading systems, large-scale ranking/recommendation, matchmaking, risk/fraud systems) is equally valued
• Low-ego and nonpolitical — you'd rather get to the right answer than be the one who's right, and you take critical feedback in stride rather than personally
• B.S. or M.S. in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience
• You've used AI coding assistants (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor, or similar) in real production work to accelerate design, implement, debug, and understand unfamiliar codebases. You have informed opinions on how best to leverage them
• You're curious about applying AI – whether that means using AI to monitor system health, triage issues or develop agentic workflows
• Genuinely collaborative and team-oriented, with an open mind toward other people's approaches and the outgoing energy to work well across teams
• Exposure to applying statistical, control-theory, or ML-driven techniques within production decision-making systems is a strong plus
• High ownership, self-motivation, critical thinking, and comfort operating with ambiguity
• You hold yourself to a high bar of correctness and understanding of what you ship, even as these tools accelerate your pace
• A demonstrated track record of owning complex systems end-to-end: design, build, operate, on-call, and iterate based on production feedback
• 10+ years of experience designing, building, and operating large-scale, low-latency distributed systems — ideally including at least one system you built substantially from the ground up
• Practical experience with distributed caching, high-throughput messaging/streaming systems, and SQL/NoSQL datastores
• Proven ability to ramp quickly on unfamiliar, complex, large codebases and become productive fast — you enjoy the “figure it out” part of the job as much as the “build it” part