Systems Operations Engineer

thetradedesk; Chicago (IL); On-site; USD 120,000 - 170,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Healthcare (medical, dental, vision)

401k plan with company match

Employee stock purchase plan

Paid holidays

Job summary

The Trade Desk seeks a seasoned Systems Operations Engineer to act as a technical expert and mentor for a growing team. You will monitor distributed platform services, triage incidents, and coordinate remediation with engineering, while maintaining thorough runbooks and documentation.

Join a high-scale environment that values reliability, incident metrics, and continuous improvement. Expect collaboration with developers, deep dive analysis, and periodic weekend coverage as needed.

Qualifications

• Undergraduate degree or relevant substitute experience.
• 6+ years relevant work experience in Technical and/or Application Support with strong knowledge of services support and troubleshooting.
• Willingness to learn new skills in distributed systems, monitoring, and incident management.

Responsibilities

• Act as a technical expert and advisor to more junior Systems Operations Engineers.
• Monitor platform services and stability via telemetry and alerts; triage issues and escalate to engineering as needed.
• Collaborate with development teams to facilitate issue remediation and manage remediation task workflow.
• Proactively update and improve Systems Operations documentation and runbooks.
• Improve incident response metrics and overall operational excellence.
• There may be periodic weekend coverage requirements.

Skills

Distributed systems expertise

Incident management

Troubleshooting

Documentation

Stakeholder communication

Education

Undergraduate degree or relevant substitute experience

Tools

Prometheus

Grafana

Nagios

SQL

Python

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.

What You'll Do

• Act as a technical expert and advisor to more junior Systems Operations Engineers
• At an escalated tier, monitor the state of platform services and stability via telemetry and alerts; triage issues, elevate to engineering teams as needed
• Work collaboratively with development teams to facilitate issue remediation
• Manage remediation task workflow
• Proactively update and improve Systems Operations documentation and runbooks
• Increase the effectiveness of the incident response process by defining and measuring relevant metrics
• There may be periodic weekend coverage requirements

Who We are Looking For

• Undergraduate degree or relevant substitute experience
• 6+ years relevant work experience in Technical and/or Application Support with strong knowledge of services support and troubleshooting
• The Systems Operations Engineer will either possess or be excited to learn a number of skills

Technical Proficiency

• Understanding of large-scale distributed system architectures (e.g., databases, web services, application services).
• Familiarity with monitoring tools (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Nagios).
• Ability to configure and fine-tune alerts.
• Proficiency or ability to learn programming languages including SQL, Python, C# to automate repetitive tasks.

Who We Are

At The Trade Desk, we recognize that a seamless customer experience is driven by operational excellence. In pursuit of constantly improving the reliability of our platform, we have established a global Systems Operations team. This team's core mission is to vigilantly monitor The Trade Desk platform services, refine our incident response methodologies, and guarantee a robust and highly-available customer experience. If you're passionate about ensuring system reliability, process improvement, and making an essential customer impact, we invite you to play a critical role in this next evolution of our on-call experience.

Incident Management and Troubleshooting

• Ability to prioritize and manage incidents based on severity, with a focus on customer impact.
• Ability to remain calm under pressure and quickly diagnose issues.
• Understanding of system logs, metrics, telemetry.

Communication Skills

• Ability to communicate effectively with stakeholders during an incident.
• Clear and concise documentation skills.
• Ability to maintain and update troubleshooting guides (TSGs) and operational documentation.
• Ability to translate complex technical issues and platform outages to non-technical stakeholders.

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. Plus, 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 401k 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 thru 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. Click here to learn more.

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