Senior Backend Engineer, Real-Time Bidding

About Trellis Trellis is rewriting the insurance experience from the inside out. We’re the tech company behind Savvy, our licensed insurance agency, and we’re bringing clarity and ease to a space known for… the opposite. With powerful tools, clean design, and a customer-first mindset, we’re making insurance shopping refreshingly effortless. We’re a profitable, fast-growing Series A startup backed by General Catalyst, QED, NYCA, and Amex Ventures. As a remote-first team, we move quickly, experiment boldly, and build with intention. If you’re craving meaningful impact, energized by ambiguity, and are ready to build alongside exceptional teammates, you’re going to love doing your best work at Trellis. Your Mission We're hiring a Senior Backend Engineer to advance our Real-Time Bidding (RTB) capabilities. You'll join a nimble, driven team and play a key role in shaping our product and architecture. This role uniquely blends product engineering with machine learning expertise. You'll focus on designing, building, and scaling the backend of our RTB system — spanning service integration (FastAPI), database infrastructure, and MLOps components — while contributing to the ML models that power our bidding engine. You'll work cross-functionally and bring expertise in Python, Kubernetes, and GCP (GKE, Pub/Sub, Dataflow, BigQuery, Vertex AI). If you have a track record solving complex scaling challenges and building reliable cloud-native systems, come help us grow our technology and your craft. This is a fully remote position, based in the US or Canada, reporting directly to the Head of RTB, Thomas Boquet. We believe in paying competitively for great work. As a remote team, we set our salaries at the 75th percentile of national market data in our industry. You can count on your pay being in line with (or above) the market. We review compensation twice a year to make sure we’re staying competitive and rewarding our team’s contributions. What You’ll Do Collaborate closely with business stakeholders and other engineers to deliver impactful solutions. Integrate services and product features with databases (Cloud SQL, Redis) and messaging queues (Pub/Sub). Contribute to the development of our MLOps tools for ML models. Build and optimize large-scale data processing pipelines for feature extraction and data transformation using BigQuery and Dataflow. Train, evaluate, deploy, and monitor machine learning models on Vertex AI to improve bidding performance. Stay fast and focused, balancing speed, performance, and scalability to deliver impact. What You’ll Need A minimum of 5 years of professional software engineering experience, demonstrating progressive growth and significant hands-on expertise in backend systems development and machine learning engineering Strong proficiency in Python. Experience with FastAPI is a plus. Deep understanding and practical experience with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Exposure to the end-to-end machine learning lifecycle: data preprocessing, feature engineering, model training, evaluation, deployment, and monitoring in production. Experience with MLOps principles and practices. Familiarity with containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes). A “get it done” mindset with the ability to make pragmatic decisions balancing speed, performance, technical debt, and scalability. Strong communication and collaboration skills. Why Trellis? Because you deserve a career that’s exciting, meaningful, and surrounded by people who lift you up. We’re a group of curious, mission-driven humans rewriting the insurance experience and having a lot of fun along the way. At Trellis, you’ll make a real impact on a product millions rely on, and grow alongside a company that’s scaling fast. What sets Trellis apart: ✨ A transparent, collaborative culture where ideas win, not titles Big opportunities to take ownership and chart your growth Competitive compensation (75th+ percentile) Fully remote across the US & Canada Quarterly virtual and/or in-person events that keep us connected Plus, the benefits are built to support your whole life: Flexible vacation (yes, actually flexible) 100% employer-paid health insurance for employees Home office budget to create your perfect setup Wellness programming, because balance matters 401(k) and HSA contributions, FSAs, bonuses & equity opportunities Paid parental leave If you want a role where you’ll grow, be trusted, and build something that genuinely improves people’s lives, Trellis is the place. Join us. We are an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. Note: all employees must complete a background check prior to starting employment with Trellis or its subsidiaries