Staff Backend Engineer, Ads Platform

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

📋 Description

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

• Take ownership of the architecture for ad selection, targeting, pacing, delivery, attribution, and measurement services.

• Focus on reliability, resilience, graceful degradation, observability, service level objectives (SLOs), and alerting.

• Advance event-driven and data-intensive architectures encompassing stores, streaming, messaging, caching, and real-time processing.

• Establish backend, reliability, and performance benchmarks adopted by various teams.

• Lead initiatives for refactoring, migration, and system health improvement.

• Define and execute multi-quarter initiatives that shape the direction of Ads and Platform.

• Address complex reliability, performance, and scalability challenges that span multiple teams.

• Collaborate with Ads, Product, Platform, Data, and ML teams.

• Mentor senior engineers, conduct technical design reviews, and enhance engineering standards.

⛳️ Requirements

• Demonstrated success in designing, building, and operating distributed backend systems at a significant production scale.

• Profound knowledge of partitioning, replication, consistency, caching, concurrency, asynchronous processing, failure isolation, and coordination.

• Strong background in diagnosing performance and scaling issues across applications, databases, caches, queues, networks, and infrastructure.

• Expertise in API design, service boundaries, event-driven architectures, streaming, messaging, distributed stores, and caching.

• Experience in owning architecture for complex distributed systems, including scalability planning, performance optimization, failure modes, and long-term evolution.

• Proven experience in building highly reliable production systems with metrics, tracing, structured logging, alerting, capacity planning, and incident response.

• Experience making architectural decisions involving scalability, reliability, latency, consistency, operational cost, complexity, and developer productivity.

• Ability to convert ambiguous product and business requirements into solid backend designs.

• Influence at the organizational level beyond direct ownership, including standards embraced by multiple teams and mentoring senior engineers.

• Track record of defining and delivering multi-quarter, cross-team initiatives.

• Experience leading substantial refactoring, migration, or system health initiatives.

• Fluency 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, and measurement.

• Preferred: experience with very high request rates, strict tail latency, multi-region systems, ML inference, ranking, recommendation, targeting, or personalization.

• Preferred: previous Staff-level experience steering architectural direction.

🏝️ Benefits

• Equity: full-time employees receive equity in Fetch.

• 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 education reimbursement.

• Participation in Employee Resource Groups and Inclusion Council.

• Flexible paid time off (PTO).

• 9 paid holidays.

• 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.

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

• Flexible work environment and fully remote work from anywhere in the US for US-based roles.

• Hardware and software provided for remote work.