Software Engineer II – Observability Platform

About the role

The Service Excellence (SE) team at The Trade Desk owns the tools and infrastructure that enable engineers to understand and operate production systems. As a Software Engineer II on the Monitoring & Observability (MOT) taskforce, you will help build and run the observability platform that powers metrics, logs, traces, alerting, and dashboards across the company.

Key responsibilities

• Design, implement, and operate a metrics platform that ingests, stores, and serves time‑series data for all engineering teams.
• Develop OpenTelemetry pipelines, trace sampling strategies, and Honeycomb integrations to make distributed tracing usable at scale.
• Create alert‑quality tooling that reduces noise, improves routing, and tightens feedback loops between alerts and owning teams.
• Collaborate with engineers across the organization to ensure observability solutions meet reliability and performance goals.

Required profile

• Curiosity about how production systems work, with some exposure to deploying, operating, or debugging real services.
• Willingness to work across the stack, including distributed systems, Kubernetes, observability pipelines, and web‑based tooling.
• Familiarity with core observability concepts such as logging, alerting, and on‑call workflows.
• A debugging mindset and clear communication skills for cross‑team collaboration.

Required skills

• Experience with observability tools and infrastructure (e.g., OpenTelemetry, Honeycomb).
• Hands‑on experience with Kubernetes.
• Knowledge of metrics platforms and distributed tracing systems.
• Experience with agentic engineering practices.