Senior Software Engineer, Backend - Infra/Platform, VenturaOS

Ventura OS is a new Smart TV operating system being built inside The Trade Desk, the world's leading independent platform for digital advertising. Where the wider company runs a global-scale DSP, Ventura is closer to a startup inside it: a small team, direct influence over product direction, and a real OS shipping to real devices in real living rooms.

We're deliberately building the CTV supply chain differently: more efficient for advertisers and publishers, more relevant for viewers, and more transparent end-to-end. The backend that powers all of it is being built now, and the Infra team is the critical foundation for it.

Infra is the foundation Ventura OS is built on. We own the compute, storage, and networking, including our Kubernetes platform, that every Ventura runs on, plus the source control and CI/CD pipelines that turn code into shipped products. We power the GPU and ML-serving infrastructure behind applied science and AI-assisted tools. We own every build system across AOSP platform, client experience and mobile, along with the lab infrastructure and release pipelines that keep platform engineering moving. We run build-test-deploy infrastructure for every app in the Ventura ecosystem, first-party and third. And we deliver telemetry end to end - from client ingestion to the dashboards leadership reads.

If it runs, ships, trains, or gets measured on Ventura OS, it runs on infrastructure we built.

You'll be an end-to-end owner of the systems this team runs - designing, building, operating, monitoring, and setting the standards other inherit. As a member of the Infrastructure team, you'll be responsible for the scalability, performance, reliability, and visibility of every cloud service powering Ventura TV OS.

In addition to the core responsibilities of a backend engineer, you will:

• Build, automate, and operate the compute (VMs, Kubernetes), networking (VPN, edge services), database (SQL/NoSQL), storage, and identity services every Ventura partner team depends on - using infrastructure-as-code and automation-first practices, and forecasting capacity needs ahead of demand for compute, storage, and GPU resources.
• Partner with application teams to design, implement, and scale the services and infrastructure behind their products.

• Own the identity, security, and compliance model for Ventura OS cloud services - authentication, authorization, audit, and adherence to security and compliance standards for every request, from internal employees to external partners.
• Monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize system performance and cost while balancing availability, efficiency, and cloud spend across the infrastructure we run.
• Deliver highly available build infrastructure (GitLab, Jenkins, Gerrit) and developer tooling relied on by internal engineers and external partner vendors alike.
• Own AOSP platform, client experience and mobile build systems, lab infrastructure, release pipelines, and shared platform-engineering tooling plus build, test, and deployment infrastructure for first- and third-party Ventura apps.
• Lead the GPU infrastructure and model-serving platforms behind applied science workloads and AI-assisted tools, including code review and incident-response automation.
• Own end-to-end telemetry infrastructure - client-side ingestion, processing pipelines, data warehousing, and analytics reporting with data privacy and governance built in by design.
• Drive major infrastructure and platform migrations, and lead adoption of new tools and standards across the org
• Own operational excellence for every service we run - observability, SLOs, on-call, incident response, disaster recovery and business continuity planning, and the documentation and runbooks that keep teams resilient during handoffs.

One of the best things about working here is the sheer variety of technical challenges. We don't expect you to know every technology we use on day one - what matters is that you learn quickly and solve complex problems with the best tool for the job. What you already know matters less than how well you adapt, think critically, and figure things out.

We're looking for a software engineer with a genuine passion for infrastructure - someone energized by hard, open-ended problems, not just familiar ones.

Culture matters here. Ventura is a small, high-impact team inside The Trade Desk, and we take pride in engineers who build trust, give generously, solve problems scrappily, and pursue excellence with grit. In practice, that means working with confidence and without ego: holding well-reasoned opinions while welcoming ideas different from your own, being quick to spot trade-offs, and staying willing to be proven wrong. It also means showing up for your teammates when things get hard.

You don't have to check every box below - if you check most of them, you're likely to thrive in this role.

• 6+ years of software engineering experience, including meaningful time on cloud platforms or distributed systems. Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent experience - we care more about what you can contribute than your credentials.
• A sustained track record of self-directed, end-to-end ownership of complex, high-impact projects - you think beyond the immediate task of understanding the "why."
• Strong engineering fundamentals and first-principles thinking. At our scale, many off-the-shelf tools and techniques don't work out of the box, and you can evaluate and adapt solutions to a unique environment.
• Commercial development experience in a modern backend language (Node.js/TypeScript, Java, Kotlin, Go, or C#).
• Extensive hands-on experience designing and operating cloud services and/or infrastructure in production, at a meaningful scale.
• Strong background in infrastructure-as-code and automation, and the discipline to get it right.
• Hands-on experience instrumenting production services for observability - metrics (e.g., Prometheus), structured logging, distributed tracing - and operating with SLO-driven, on-call rigor.
• Solid understanding of relational and NoSQL data stores (Postgres, MySQL, Redis, or similar), including safe tenant-scoped data modeling.
• Experience owning a shared platform that other engineering teams build on - codifying standards, running "paved paths," and driving adoption without disrupting partner teams' delivery.
• A track record of sound technical decision-making, with experience of mentoring engineers through code and design review.
• Strong communication skills with both technical and non-technical audiences, and comfort scoping and sequencing work under ambiguity.

• Deep understanding of cloud services and Kubernetes on AWS, GCP, or Azure at scale.
• Exposure to identity/security systems (authN/authZ, audit) in a production environment.
• Familiarity with GPU infrastructure or ML-serving platforms.
• Background in Smart TV, OTT, or CTV services - or on any infrastructure layer that backs up a hardware fleet or a consumer-facing OS.