Lead Staff Systems Reliability Engineer (Linux & Distributed Systems)

The Trade Desk; United States; Remote; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

The Trade Desk is seeking a Lead Systems Reliability Engineer to join our engineering team and continue building and maintaining our data-driven platform. You will lead a team responsible for Linux-based systems running Aerospike, Kafka, and Mongo, and collaborate with global data centers and cloud providers to ensure sub-millisecond latency and high availability.

You’ll drive automation, performance tuning, and on-call readiness while mentoring others and shaping the future of our

Qualifications

• Linux operating system
• Leadership experience and ability to mentor
• Troubleshooting techniques for isolation, scientific method
• Identify bottlenecks (CPU? IO?)

Responsibilities

• Lead a team to influence, manage, and plan work streams, systems, and data structures at scale within a global ecosystem.
• Encourage, improve, and build infrastructure automation at scale with stateful systems.
• Own operations for Linux-based systems running Aerospike, Kafka, and Mongo.
• Serve as a point of contact to review new use cases and participate in on-call rotation.
• Learn to be a NoSQL SME and be trained if needed.
• Benchmark and analyze next generation hardware offerings.

Skills

Linux

Leadership experience

Troubleshooting

Tools

Ansible

Prometheus

Kubernetes

Python

Ruby

Rust

Bash

Golang

C#

Job description

The Trade Desk is a global technology company and the world’s leading independent platform for digital advertising, with nearly 4,000 employees across more than 30 offices. Our technology helps advertisers reach the right audiences across the open internet — from streaming TV and podcasts to mobile apps, news, and more.

Advertising powers the content people love. By making it more transparent, effective, and responsible, we help support trusted journalism, quality entertainment, and creators worldwide. The world’s brands and agencies rely on us to reach their customers and grow their businesses responsibly.

The scale of our platform brings unique technical challenges — from processing massive datasets in real time to building systems that operate reliably on a global scale. When you work here, your impact is worldwide. We welcome diverse perspectives, encourage curiosity, and build teams that learn from one another. If you’re driven to solve meaningful challenges, we’d love to meet you.

Whatwe do

We are looking to hire a Lead Systems Reliability Engineer to join our engineering team to continue building and maintaining our data-driven platform. We leverage technologies like Aerospike, MongoDB, and Kafka to perform many real time activities, translating to with a p99 latency under 1 millisecond on the back end!

Do you enjoy tuning, performance testing, troubleshooting, automation, and operating at scale? Does testing next-gen hardware, evaluating data access patterns, and designing automation around distributed systems excite you?

What makes this role different:

• First in the Industry: The Trade Desk is the first company to run over 5MM QPS to NVMe in Aerospike on a single node, forcing core software redesigns to achieve this scale.
• Work on Cutting-Edge Hardware: Design clusters with nodes featuring 300TB of NVMe, 3TB RAM, and 512 cores, delivering a global 2,500GB/s throughput directly from flash.
• Shape the Future of Infrastructure: Spec your own systems and collaborate directly with AMD and NoSQL vendors to run PoCs and optimize bleeding-edge technology for internet-scale workloads.
• Deep Performance Engineering: Dive into kernel, hardware, and system interactions, leveraging tools like flamegraphs, NUMA counters, BIOS tuning, and synthetic testing to achieve world-class performance.
• Push Hardware Endurance Limits: Build clusters engineered to withstand over 1 zettabyte of endurance.

What you’ll do:

• Lead a team to influence, manage, and plan work streams, systems, and data structures at scale within a global ecosystem, spanning multiple infrastructure providers (cloud and traditional datacenters).
• Encourage, improve, and build infrastructure automation in a way that works with stateful systems at scale.
• Own operations for Linux-based systems running Aerospike, Kafka, and Mongo.
• Serve as a point of contact to review new use cases, answer questions, and participate in on-call rotation.
• Learn to be a NoSQL SME. You do not need experience to apply – we will train you.
• Benchmark and analyze next generation hardware offerings.

Who you are:

Skills and Experience

• Linux operating system
• Leadership experience and ability to mentor
• Troubleshooting
  • Techniques for isolation, scientific method
  • Identify bottlenecks (Is it CPU? IO?)
• Nice-To-Have experience:
  • Physical hardware (on-prem) internals, management, and operation
  • Performing testing and tuning
  • Databases (relational or NoSQL)
  • Ansible/PyInfra/Chef
  • Prometheus
  • Kubernetes
  • Python/Ruby/Rust/Bash/Golang/C#

An Empathetic, Objective, Critical Thinker:

• Thinking beyond the task at hand to deeply understand the ‘why’ behind an objective.
• A welcoming of ideas, and understanding of, perspectives that are different from your own and an interest in seeking and building from a common ground.
• You are a creative thinker, not bound by \u201Cthe way things have always been done\u201D but are thinking of the questions nobody has thought of and are \u201Cyet to be asked\u201D. What you know is less important than how well you learn, innovate, collaborate, and adapt.
• As a global team from many diverse backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives, you value and seek out paths for fostering diversity.

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.

As an Equal Opportunity Employer, The Trade Desk is committed to creating an inclusive hiring experience where everyone has the opportunity to thrive.

Please reach out to us at [e-mail] to request an accommodation or discuss any accessibility needs you may require to access our Company Website or navigate any part of the hiring process.

When you contact us, please include your preferred contact details and specify the nature of your accommodation request or questions. Any information you share will be handled confidentially and will not impact our hiring decisions.