Overview

The Senior Staff Engineer plays a critical role in driving the performance, scalability, and intelligence of TripleLift’s Exchange — the real-time bidding platform that processes over a trillion ad transactions per month and sits at the heart of TripleLift. In this role, you will partner closely with engineers, product managers, data scientists, and platform teams across our entire ecosystem to design, build, and operate the core RTB services that decide which ads run, where, and at what price. 

This is an exciting opportunity for an experienced backend engineer who wants to work on high-scale, low-latency distributed systems to help shape the next generation of programmatic advertising in an AI-accelerated environment.

Responsibilities

• 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 (e.g., Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor) 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.

Education & Requirements

• 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.
• Experience with event-driven, non-blocking JVM frameworks for low-latency network services.
• Data skills such as Apache Spark, Snowflake, Red Panda
• Hands-on experience with NoSQL and other specialized low-latency key-value stores operated at high QPS.
• Background in ad tech, RTB, or programmatic advertising, including familiarity with OpenRTB, VAST, or related industry protocols.
• Demonstrated JVM performance tuning experience: GC analysis, async/non-blocking I/O, lock contention, allocation profiling, and CPU/memory optimization in hot paths.
• Track record of leading cross-team or cross-region technical initiatives, including writing design docs and driving architectural decisions to consensus.
• Ownership mindset and drive for achievement
• Creative problem solver
• Passion for continuous learning and automation
• Excellent organization, attention to detail, and time management
• Independent work ethic and adaptability to fast-paced environments
• Strong problem-solving, critical thinking, and collaborative skills
• Openness to feedback and a growth mindset