Senior Software Engineer – Core RTB

About the role

TripleLift is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to own and evolve its real‑time bidding (RTB) platform, a core component that processes over a trillion ad transactions each month. You will work with engineers, product managers, data scientists and platform teams across New York and Zurich to build high‑throughput, low‑latency services that decide which ads run, where, and at what price.

Key responsibilities

• Own a mission‑critical Java codebase that executes billions of times daily under sub‑100 ms latency across multiple AWS regions.
• Design, build and maintain high‑throughput services for bidding logic, auction mechanics, traffic shaping and creative processing with a focus on reliability, observability and cost efficiency.
• Write maintainable, well‑tested code, instrument production with metrics, traces and alerts, and take end‑to‑end ownership of service health.
• Leverage modern AI coding assistants (Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor) to accelerate development while applying strong engineering judgment.
• Research emerging AI/ML technologies for bidding and traffic decisions and translate promising ideas into production systems.
• Partner with global engineering teams to maintain shared standards for architecture, code review, observability and incident response.
• Mentor engineers on Java, distributed‑systems best practices and responsible use of AI tooling.

Required profile

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent experience.
• 3+ years of professional backend engineering experience at scale, primarily in Java.
• Proven experience building high‑performance APIs handling billions of requests per day with strict latency requirements.
• Strong understanding of distributed‑system patterns: concurrency, caching, back‑pressure, fault tolerance and observability.
• Experience operating services across multiple AWS regions or comparable cloud environments.
• Fluent use of AI coding assistants and clear judgment on when human review is required.

Required skills

• Java (including Netty or other non‑blocking JVM frameworks)
• AWS cloud services
• In‑memory stores: Memcache, Redis
• Messaging systems: Apache Kafka, RabbitMQ
• AI coding assistants: Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor
• Familiarity with Apache Spark, Snowflake, Red Panda
• Experience with low‑latency key‑value stores such as Aerospike or Couchbase
• Knowledge of ad‑tech protocols: OpenRTB, VAST