Senior Software Engineer - Observability & IRM

The Trade Desk is a global technology company with a mission to create a better, more open internet for everyone through principled, intelligent advertising. Handling over 1 trillion queries per day, our platform operates at an unprecedented scale. We have also built something even stronger and more valuable: an award‑winning culture based on trust, ownership, empathy, and collaboration. We value the unique experiences and perspectives that each person brings to The Trade Desk, and we are committed to fostering inclusive spaces where everyone can bring their authentic selves to work every day.

Do you have a passion for solving hard problems at scale? Are you eager to join a dynamic, globally‑connected team where your contributions will make a meaningful difference in building a better media ecosystem? Come and see why Fortune magazine consistently ranks The Trade Desk among the best small‑to‑medium‑sized workplaces globally.

About the Team

The Service Excellence (SE) team owns the tools and infrastructure that help engineers at The Trade Desk understand and operate production systems. The Incident Response Services (IRS) taskforce focuses on the on‑call experience. The team is responsible for making incidents easier to detect, manage, and optimize using historical data points information.

What you will work on

• Incident management tooling
• Build and maintain automation around the incident lifecycle: alerting, escalation, incident channels, retros, and SLA tracking
• Help evaluate and migrate our logging stack
• Participate in the re‑evaluation of our logging vendor and collection architecture
• Backstage/Service catalog – Extend our internal developer portal with K8s integrations, maturity models, and SLO adoption tooling
• Alert quality tooling – Build the systems that give engineers better signal and less noise – smarter routing, better grouping, tighter feedback loops between alerts and the teams that own them

Who you are

• Experience building and operating production infrastructure or internal developer tooling
• Comfort working across the stack – this role touches distributed systems, Kubernetes, observability pipelines, and web‑based tooling
• Familiarity with observability concepts: logging, alerting, on‑call workflows
• Strong debugging instincts: you will be expected to be called on when things break
• Clear communication: the team works closely with engineers across the company; you'll need to explain tradeoffs and advocate for solutions

Plus skills

• Experience with Grafana, Prometheus, or similar observability tools
• Familiarity with Sumo Logic or other log management platforms
• Prior work on developer portals or service catalog tooling (Backstage, OpsLevel, etc.)
• Experience with Kubernetes at scale

Variety of technical opportunity is one of the best things about working at The Trade Desk as a software engineer which is why we do not expect you to know every technology we use when you start. What we care about is that you can learn quickly and find solutions to complex problems using the optimum tools for the job. What you know is less important than how well you learn and innovate. We don’t need engineers who know all the answers; we need engineers who can invent the answers no one has thought of yet, to the questions yet to be asked.

The Trade Desk does not accept unsolicited resumes from search firm recruiters. Fees will not be paid in the event a candidate submitted by a recruiter without an agreement in place is hired; such resumes will be deemed the sole property of The Trade Desk. The Trade Desk is an equal‑opportunity employer. All aspects of employment will be based on merit, competence, performance, and business needs. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, marital status, age, national origin, ancestry, physical or mental disability, medical condition, pregnancy, genetic information, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, veteran status, or any other status protected under federal, state, or local law.

In accordance with various US state laws, the range provided is the Trade Desk’s reasonable estimate of the base compensation for this role. The actual amount may differ based on non‑discriminatory factors such as experience, knowledge, skills, and location. All employees may be eligible to become The Trade Desk shareholders through eligibility for stock‑based compensation grants, which are awarded to employees based on company and individual performance. The Trade Desk also offers other compensation depending on the role such as variable compensation‑based incentives and commissions. Expected benefits for this role include comprehensive healthcare (medical, dental, and vision) with premiums paid in full for employees and dependents, retirement benefits such as a 401(k) plan and company match, short and long‑term disability coverage, basic life insurance, well‑being benefits, reimbursement for certain tuition expenses, parental leave, sick time of 1 hour per 30 hours worked, vacation time for full‑time employees up to 120 hours through the first year and 160 hours thereafter, and around 13 paid holidays per year. Employees can also purchase The Trade Desk stock at a discount through The Trade Desk’s Employee Stock Purchase Plan.

The Trade Desk also offers a competitive benefits package.

Note: Interns are not eligible for variable incentive awards such as stock‑based compensation, retirement plan, vacation, tuition reimbursement or parental leave.

The base salary range for this role is $124,900—$228,900 USD .