Senior Software Engineer, Network Automation

Job title: Senior Software Engineer, Network Automation

About the Role

The Trade Desk is seeking a Senior Software Engineer who thrives at the intersection of deep networking expertise and software craftsmanship. You will partner closely with SRE and infrastructure teams to shape strategy and build the next generation of network automation for a global, high-performance ad tech platform.

What You'll Do

• Design, build, and scale a global network platform spanning physical datacenters and multi-cloud environments across AWS, Azure, and Alibaba Cloud.

• Support thousands of hosts worldwide, engineering reliable and efficient solutions to petabyte-scale data challenges.

• Own troubleshooting and resolution of complex network issues, upholding high availability and performance across the entire infrastructure footprint.

• Lead root cause analysis and postmortems, turning incidents into actionable improvements that raise the bar for operational excellence.

• Eliminate toil by building tools, automating workflows, and continuously improving the processes your team depends on every day.

• Share responsibility for network integrity through participation in a global, follow-the-sun on-call rotation.

• What We're Looking For

• 6-8 years of hands-on experience in network automation and operating large-scale production infrastructure.

• Software-first mindset with strong development and networking experience, able to think like an engineer and operate like an architect.

• Deep expertise in TCP/IP, OSI model, and large-scale networking protocols including BGP and OSPF.

• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes networking technologies such as Cilium and Calico, and a solid understanding of container network interfaces.

• Experience managing software load balancers like NGINX Ingress, Envoy, or HAProxy in large-scale production environments.

• Troubleshooting and performance tuning in Kubernetes and Docker networking, with a focus on networking. Experience running Kubernetes clusters on bare-metal is a plus.

• Proficiency with IPv6 configuration and transition strategies; SDN and SDN controller experience; QoS implementations and bandwidth management.

• Experience operating network devices at scale using network operating systems such as SONiC, Cisco IOS, JunOS, Arista EOS, or Nokia SR Linux/SR OS.

• Familiarity with monitoring/alerting systems, writing complex rules and time-series queries using Prometheus and Grafana.

• Infrastructure-as-code and DevOps/SRE principles to programmatically build and manage networks; ability to create robust workflows and pipelines for testing and safe production deployments.

• Interest or background in platform engineering to plan and build infrastructure for large-scale distributed systems.

• Proficiency with Python or Go for automation and tool-building.

• Experience integrating AI tools into engineering processes to automate tasks and improve development velocity.

• Strong collaboration, communication, and documentation skills to align across teams.

• Nice to Have

• Experience integrating AI-assisted development tools into engineering workflows.