Staff Software Engineer (Demand Bidder, Ad Serving Platform)

Join our team as a Staff Software Engineer, where you will 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 will have the opportunity to take ownership of key initiatives, design and build core components, and mentor other engineers. You will work closely with engineers and applied scientists at the intersection of distributed systems and statistical/ML-driven decision-making.

• 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.
• Strong command of Java, with a solid foundation in algorithms, data structures, concurrency/multi-threading, and performance optimization
• B.S. or M.S. in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience
• Comfort operating in cloud infrastructure (GCP or AWS) at scale
• Practical experience with distributed caching, high-throughput messaging/streaming systems, and SQL/NoSQL datastores
• 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
• 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
• Experience evolving and refactoring live, business-critical systems without compromising uptime or correctness
• 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
• A demonstrated track record of owning complex systems end-to-end: design, build, operate, on-call, and iterate based on production feedback
• Genuinely collaborative and team-oriented, with an open mind toward other people's approaches and the outgoing energy to work well across teams
• 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
• 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
• High ownership, self-motivation, critical thinking, and comfort operating with ambiguity
• 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
• You're curious about applying AI – whether that means using AI to monitor system health, triage issues or develop agentic workflows
• Exposure to applying statistical, control-theory, or ML-driven techniques within production decision-making systems is a strong plus
• You hold yourself to a high bar of correctness and understanding of what you ship, even as these tools accelerate your pace