Senior Backend Engineer — Real-Time Bidding (RTB)

TripleLift

Zürich

On-site

CHF 170,000 - 210,000

Full time

14 days+

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Job summary

TripleLift is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join the Core RTB Engineering team. You will design, build, and operate core RTB services that decide ads to run at sub-100 ms latency, across NYC and Zurich hubs.

This role focuses on high-throughput Java code and distributed systems at internet scale. You will partner with product managers, data scientists, and platform teams to push AI-enabled optimizations, ensure reliability, and maintain observability.

Qualifications

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, a related technical field, or equivalent professional experience.
5+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a strong focus on backend services running in production at scale.
Demonstrated experience building high-performance APIs and services in Java.
Track record of working on large-scale, network-heavy systems handling billions of HTTP requests per day under strict latency requirements.
Familiarity with in-memory key-value stores (e.g., Memcache, Redis) and messaging systems (e.g., Apache Kafka, RabbitMQ).
Solid grasp of distributed systems design patterns and their trade-offs, including concurrency, caching, backpressure, fault tolerance, and observability.
Production experience operating services across multiple AWS regions or comparable cloud environments.
Working fluency with modern AI coding assistants (e.g., Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor) and a thoughtful point of view on where AI tooling accelerates work and where human judgment must lead.
Strong written communication and comfort collaboration skills.

Responsibilities

Own a mission-critical Java codebase that powers TripleLift’s Exchange — executing billions of times a day under sub-100-millisecond latency budgets and across multiple AWS regions and data centers.
Design, build, and evolve high-throughput services for bidding logic, auction mechanics, traffic shaping, and creative/image processing, with a focus on reliability, observability, and cost efficiency.
Write maintainable, well-tested code; instrument production systems with meaningful metrics, traces, and alerts; and take end-to-end ownership of the health of the services you ship.
Use modern AI coding assistants as a routine part of your workflow — leveraging them to accelerate development, raise code quality, and explore design alternatives, while applying strong engineering judgment to validate and own every line that reaches production.
Research and evaluate emerging technologies, including AI/ML-driven optimizations and agentic capabilities relevant to bidding and traffic decisions, and translate promising ideas into production-quality systems.
Partner with engineers across our NYC and Zurich teams to maintain shared standards in architecture, code review, observability, and incident response, operating as one consistent global Core RTB engineering function.
Mentor and coach other engineers on Java, distributed systems best practices, and the effective and responsible use of AI tooling, raising the bar across the team.