Senior Software Engineer

Role Description

As a Senior Software Engineer at Upwave, you’ll be a full-stack problem solver with a backend focus—building the APIs, data pipelines, and systems that power our brand measurement platform. Your work will process billions of ad impressions, manage complex data workflows, and deliver insights that inform marketing decisions for the world’s biggest brands.

• Build AI-powered customer experiences — integrate LLMs and advanced causal inference techniques into production workflows that automatically generate data visualizations, synthesize campaign performance into natural language insights, and help enterprise customers understand and optimize their advertising through our AI analyst "Bayes."
• Design and build scalable backend systems — develop microservices and RESTful APIs that power the analytics platform behind the world’s top brand campaigns.
• Contribute across the stack — work from backend APIs to Python analytics services to React frontends, delivering complete features that combine sophisticated data analysis with intuitive user experiences.
• Engineer data pipelines at scale — design and operate systems that process massive volumes of ad and survey data with MySQL, DynamoDB, and AWS (S3, Lambda, EMR, Kinesis Firehose).
• Improve reliability and performance — deploy services on Kubernetes and AWS, automate deployments via CI/CD, monitor with DataDog and Sentry, and continuously raise the bar for operational excellence.
• Collaborate deeply — work closely with Product and Data Science to productionize statistical models, integrate advanced analytics into customer-facing tools, and bring cutting-edge AI capabilities to enterprise customers.
• Deliver insights that move millions — enable brand lift analytics and real-time campaign insights by building reliable, high-throughput systems. Multi-million dollar advertising decisions hinge on our recommendations.

Qualifications

• You’re an experienced engineer (5+ years) who thrives on solving complex problems across APIs, data systems, and distributed infrastructure.
• You’ve built powerful, intuitive, API-driven products for professional users.
• You’re comfortable across the stack, with experience in RDBMS-backed backends using Spring Boot, Django, Rails, or Express, and single-page frontends built in React, Vue, or Angular.
• You understand and enjoy programming. You’re fluent in the modern landscape of UI frameworks, API and microservice architectures, databases, and cloud platforms—and know when to use the right tool for the job.
• You embrace modern AI-powered development tools to move faster and code smarter.
• You value structured software development practices—testing, documentation, CI/CD, and code review—and care about building maintainable systems that scale.
• You believe developers should operate what they build.
• You like turning ideas into tools that make real customers more effective.
• You mentor others, share knowledge freely, and understand that healthy human systems are the foundation of healthy technical systems.
• You want to understand how things work and why.
• You take responsibility, move quickly to fix problems, and take pride in establishing areas of deep expertise in a fast-changing environment.
• You believe high-trust, inclusive teams outperform individuals.

Requirements

• Bonus points for working with modern backend ecosystems like Java/Kotlin/Groovy (Spring Boot or Grails) and knowing how to design APIs that scale elegantly.
• Fluency with data systems such as MySQL, DynamoDB, and Presto, and understanding the tradeoffs between relational and NoSQL storage.
• Experience building cloud-native applications on AWS, especially using Kubernetes and Terraform for automation and scalability.
• Familiarity with modern front-end frameworks like React/Redux.
• Startup DNA—comfortable with ambiguity, iterate fast, and make pragmatic technical decisions.
• Experience from AdTech, MarTech, or measurement platforms, or excitement to learn how AI and large-scale data intersect in this space.

Benefits

• Engineering-first company: Upwave’s success depends on high-velocity innovation, and we believe high velocity comes from high efficiency, not high effort.
• Modern tech stack: Python analytics, Kotlin/Java APIs, event streaming (100k+ RPM), DynamoDB, Kubernetes, AWS, Terraform, LLM orchestration.
• Impact at scale: Your code processes billions of advertising events and directly influences multi-million dollar decisions by Fortune 500 brands.
• Autonomy and ownership: Our engineers lead projects from design through deployment and monitoring.
• Ambitious but humble culture: We take our work seriously but never ourselves.
• Remote-first team: Our diverse team spans half the globe.