Principal Engineer, Ads Platform

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in United States.

📋 Description

• Design, scale, and enhance high-throughput, low-latency distributed systems that drive Fetch’s personalized advertising platform.

• Define the architecture for ad selection, targeting, pacing, delivery, attribution, and measurement services.

• Make strategic decisions on partitioning, caching, consistency, concurrency, and performance as the platform expands.

• Develop strategies for graceful degradation during partial failures, traffic surges, and downstream issues.

• Set up metrics, tracing, service level objectives (SLOs), and alerting for systems that generate revenue.

• Oversee transactional and non-transactional storage, streaming, messaging, caching, and real-time processing architecture.

• Establish organization-wide standards for service design, APIs, observability, reliability, testing, and operational readiness.

• Lead significant migrations, architectural redesigns, and foundational changes to the platform.

• Own the long-term engineering strategy for the Ads platform and influence priorities and architecture across the company.

• Address complex cross-organizational challenges and facilitate technical alignment among Ads, Platform, Product, Data, and ML teams.

• Mentor both staff and senior engineers, while coaching engineering managers and technical leaders.

• Maintain hands-on involvement in architecture, implementation, debugging, strategy, and mentorship.

⛳️ Requirements

• Extensive experience in designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed backend systems in a production environment.

• Profound understanding of distributed systems, including partitioning, replication, consistency models, caching, concurrency, asynchronous processing, failure modes, and coordination.

• Proven experience in diagnosing and resolving performance and scalability issues across applications, databases, caches, queues, networks, and infrastructure.

• Strong expertise in service-oriented or microservice architectures, APIs, event-driven systems, and high-volume data processing.

• Experience in making architectural trade-offs among relational and non-relational databases, streaming platforms, caching technologies, and distributed storage.

• Solid production operations background, including observability, SLOs, incident response, capacity planning, load testing, and reliability engineering.

• Demonstrated success in driving major migrations or architectural redesigns that enhance scalability, velocity, or reliability.

• Proven ability to resolve highly complex, cross-organizational challenges that impede significant initiatives.

• Demonstrated influence on long-term engineering strategy and architecture across multiple teams or organizations.

• Experience mentoring principal and staff engineers, as well as coaching engineering managers and technical leaders.

• Capability to remain actively involved at a Principal level across architecture, implementation, debugging, strategy, and mentorship.

• Proficiency in Kubernetes, event streaming, distributed data stores, cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, and observability tools.

• Preferred: experience in advertising, ad-serving, auction, marketplace, recommendation, or real-time decision-making systems.

• Preferred: familiarity with targeting, pacing, bidding, frequency management, attribution, incrementality, measurement, and revenue integrity.

• Preferred: experience handling very high request rates, strict tail latency, large-scale event streaming, and real-time processing.

• Preferred: experience designing multi-region or globally distributed systems.

• Preferred: success in reducing infrastructure costs while enhancing throughput, reliability, or performance.

• Preferred: experience with real-time ML inference, ranking, recommendation, or personalization.

• Preferred: influence through open source, standards organizations, or the broader technical community.

🏝️ Benefits

• Equity: Fetch provides full-time employees with equity in the company.

• 401(k) matching dollar for dollar, up to 4% of eligible pay.

• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision plans, including coverage for pets.

• $10,000 per year in educational reimbursement.

• Participation in Employee Resource Groups and the Inclusion Council.

• Flexible paid time off (PTO).

• 9 paid holidays annually.

• A week-long break at the end of the year.

• 14 weeks of fully paid parental leave.

• 6 additional weeks of paid childbirth recovery leave for birthing parents.

• Flexible return-to-work schedule.

• A one-time $2,000 Calvin Care Cash incentive for employees welcoming new family members.

• A flexible work environment with fully remote work options available anywhere in the US for US-based roles.

• Hardware and software provided for remote work.