Principal Backend Engineer for Ads Platform

Fetch; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Fetch is seeking a Principal Backend Engineer to define and scale the architecture behind high‑throughput ad systems. You will own the long‑term strategy, drive architectural migrations, and lead cross‑team technical initiatives that impact the entire engineering organization.

You will remain hands‑on while guiding architecture, implementation, debugging, and mentorship at Principal scope, ensuring reliability, performance, and real‑time decisioning at scale.

Qualifications

• Significant experience designing and operating large-scale distributed backend systems.
• Deep understanding of partitioning, replication, consistency, caching, and concurrency.
• Experience diagnosing performance and scaling problems across infra, databases, and queues.
• Strong expertise in microservice/API architectures and event-driven systems.
• Proven ability to balance tradeoffs between relational/non-relational stores and streaming platforms.

Responsibilities

• Own platform architecture for high-throughput, low-latency ad systems.
• Design for reliability, set SLOs, tracing, and alerting.
• Evolve data pipelines, streaming, and real-time processing.
• Set architectural standards across services and APIs.
• Drive migrations and platform re-foundations to improve scalability.
• Shape long-term engineering strategy across the Ads platform.
• Mentor principal and senior engineers and coaches teams.

Skills

Distributed backend design

High-throughput systems

System architecture

Reliability engineering

Observability

Kubernetes

Event-driven architectures

API design

Performance tuning

Mentorship

Tools

Kubernetes

CI/CD

Observability tooling

Job description

Fetch is seeking a Principal Backend Engineer to define and scale the architecture behind high‑throughput ad systems. You will own the long‑term strategy, drive architectural migrations, and lead cross‑team technical initiatives that impact the entire engineering organization.

You will remain hands‑on while guiding architecture, implementation, debugging, and mentorship at Principal scope, ensuring reliability, performance, and real‑time decisioning at scale.