Staff Software Engineer (Backend)

TL;DR

Staff Software Engineer (Backend): Lead design and development of scalable services powering ad delivery, trafficking, and billing platforms with an accent on distributed systems, event-driven architecture, and revenue-critical pipelines. Focus on modernizing legacy systems, cloud-native transformation, and integrating AI for ad optimization and anomaly detection.

Location: Hybrid in Oakland, CA; Atlanta, GA; New York, NY. Must have legal right to work in the U.S.

Salary: $106,600 - $200,000

Company

Leading audio entertainment and digital ad tech provider with brands like Pandora, hirify.global Media, and AdsWizz, reaching over 150 million listeners monthly.

What you will do

• Lead design and development of scalable ASP services for ad delivery across platforms.
• Architect and evolve Slingshot platform to event-driven, cloud-native paradigms.
• Own end-to-end delivery from system design to deployment, monitoring, and optimization.
• Collaborate with Product, Data Engineering, DevOps, SRE, Data, and ML teams on ad-serving capabilities.
• Champion observability, reliability, and CI/CD practices using Datadog and Grafana.
• Mentor engineers and influence technology roadmap aligned with ad tech goals.

Requirements

• 8+ years software engineering experience.
• Deep expertise in Python (Django, FastAPI), backend architecture, async programming, microservices.
• Strong distributed systems and data pipelines (Celery, Kafka, Airflow).
• Experience with ad servers (Google Ad Manager, AdsWizz, Triton).
• Hands-on AWS, Kubernetes, observability (Datadog, Sentry, Grafana), CI/CD.
• Proven cross-team leadership, mentoring, architecture influence.
• Bachelor’s/Master’s in CS or equivalent.
• Legal right to work in the U.S.

Culture & Benefits

• Diverse, collaborative environment fostering innovation and technical rigor.
• Focus on high availability, operational excellence, and continuous improvement.
• Discretionary short-term and long-term incentives eligibility.
• Equal opportunity employer committed to mutual respect and professionalism.