Staff Software Engineer, Ads & Core Serving Platform
Leads architecture and implementation of large-scale, low-latency serving platforms supporting Ads and Core experiences. The role requires 8+ years of backend or distributed-systems experience, strong technical leadership, and expertise in scalable production systems.
About the job
Responsibilities
- Set technical direction and lead architecture for major serving-platform initiatives across Ads and Core.
- Build and operate scalable, highly available systems with defined performance, reliability, and efficiency goals.
- Partner with product, ML, infrastructure, and Core/Ads engineering teams to translate complex requirements into reusable platform capabilities.
- Improve serving platforms through framework modernization, API evolution, experimentation controls, observability, and debugging tools.
- Lead complex projects end to end, including technical strategy, design, implementation, rollout, adoption, and operational readiness.
- Use AI to accelerate analysis, debugging, design exploration, and iteration while applying sound engineering judgment and validation.
- Raise quality through design reviews, code reviews, documentation, and operational excellence.
- Mentor engineers and scale technical leadership across the organization.
Requirements
- 8+ years of software engineering experience building and operating production backend or distributed systems.
- Experience leading complex technical initiatives across teams or organizations.
- Strong expertise in distributed systems, online serving, low-latency services, or infrastructure platforms.
- Ability to make tradeoffs across latency, reliability, scalability, cost, and developer experience.
- Strong communication and collaboration skills.
- Proficiency in one or more programming languages such as Java, C++, Go, or Python.
- Experience mentoring engineers and elevating technical standards.
- Ability to use AI to improve engineering workflows with rigorous testing, validation, and responsible use.
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, a related technical field, or equivalent experience.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience with ads delivery, recommendation or search serving, retrieval, ranking, or experimentation systems.
- Experience with serving-framework migrations, platform consolidation, or developer tooling.
- Experience with observability, production debugging, traffic management, or incident response.
Compensation
- Base salary: $208,454–$364,795 USD.
- Eligible for equity.
Skills
Distributed Systems, Backend Systems, Online Serving, Low-Latency Services, Infrastructure Platforms, Java, C++, Go, Python, Observability, API Design, Incident Response, Traffic Management, Developer Tooling, Experimentation Systems
Similar jobs
Backend Engineering jobs
Plaid
New York, NY
Leads architecture and execution for large-scale credit insights platforms, spanning online feature serving, offline pipelines, and machine-learning systems. The role requires strong backend scaling experience, technical leadership, and collaboration with product, data science, and ML teams.
Plaid
Seattle, WALeads the technical direction and hands-on development of real-time fraud intelligence systems, including scoring, attributes, APIs, and integrations. Requires 8+ years building scalable backend or distributed systems, strong product judgment, and close collaboration with data science, machine learning, and product teams.
Airbnb
United States
Leads the technical direction of Airbnb’s event-logging infrastructure, architecting scalable backend systems, shaping roadmaps, and delivering production tooling. Requires 9+ years of engineering experience, backend expertise, and a strong record of technical leadership and mentorship.
Celonis
Redwood City, CAStaff Software Engineer developing high-performance query-engine and core data-processing systems in modern C++. The role requires 8+ years of software engineering experience, deep database-internals expertise, and strong knowledge of large-scale data processing, algorithms, and performance optimization.
Airbnb
United States
Staff engineer responsible for architecting and scaling Airbnb’s account platform, including account state, eligibility, and entitlements. The role requires 9+ years of distributed backend systems experience, strong technical leadership, and expertise in reliability, consistency, caching, and API design.