Staff Product Manager, Developer Platform
$151k - $277k USD
The Trade Desk is changing the way global brands and their agencies advertise to audiences around the world. How? With a media buying platform that helps brands deliver a more insightful and relevant ad experience for consumers –– and sets a new standard for global reach, accuracy, and transparency. We are proud of the culture we have built. We value the unique experiences and perspectives that each person brings to The Trade Desk, and we are committed to fostering inclusive spaces where everyone can bring their authentic selves to work every day.
So, if you are talented, driven, creative, and eager to join a dynamic, globally-connected team, then we want to talk!
WHO WE ARE LOOKING FOR:
THIS ROLE IS NOT FOR EVERYONE: This is a highly technical Product Management role where you'll spend your days embedded with senior engineers, reviewing CI/CD pipelines, analyzing build times, mapping out complex dependency chains, and optimizing developer workflows. If you can't confidently discuss git merge strategies, explain the trade-offs between monorepos and multi-repos, or understand what happens between "git push" and code running in production, this role will be extremely challenging.
Our mission is to build the internal developer platform that powers The Trade Desk's engineering organization. We own the tools, workflows, and infrastructure that our developers interact with hundreds of times per day—from the moment they check out a repo to when they ship code to production and perform ongoing experiments.
We're looking for a technical Product Manager who has shipped products TO developers, not just products WITH developers. You should get excited about reducing build times by 30%, streamlining the code review process, or reimagining our local development environment. Your customers are senior engineers who will quickly lose patience if you don't understand their world.
The Trade Desk Product Team hires courageous, passionate PMs who set big goals and execute them. We help you grow and challenge you with hard, meaningful work. We celebrate our successes and learn from our failures together. We value and develop strong leadership, asking our PMs to take on ambitious and often ambiguous projects that promise to extend our lead in the industry.
WHAT YOU WILL BE DOING:
Our teams own the software development life cycle at The Trade Desk – from the first day of a new developer, to the first discussions about a feature, to coding and debugging, through deployment into our global data centers, and all the way to A/B Testing and Experimentation. Our goal is to build tools, frameworks, automation, and processes that help our developers focus their time on delivering customer value.
You will roll up your sleeves and dive deep into the problems our developers face every day. This means shadowing engineers through their entire workflow, analyzing bottlenecks in our build pipeline, investigating why code reviews are taking too long, and understanding the friction points in our deployment process. From this hands-on research, you'll synthesize insights into a north star vision and strategic roadmap for our developer experience.
On a typical day, you might:
- Shadow a developer through their entire workflow to identify friction points
- Analyze metrics showing a 20% increase in build failures and work with platform engineers to diagnose root causes
- Facilitate a technical deep-dive with senior engineers on container startup times
- Write a technical specification for improving our local development environment
- Review user research showing developers are context-switching 47 times per day and design solutions to reduce interruptions
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Present a monthly roadmap to engineering leadership, articulating technical trade-offs and timelines
Your responsibilities include:
- Understanding the needs of our Trade Desk Engineering Team through direct engagement, user research, and data analysis
- Defining our developer experience (DX) strategy and building the roadmap to get there
- Owning key areas such as: local developer environment setup, source control workflows (checkout, build, merge), code review processes, cross-team code stewardship, and deployment automation
- Establishing the right metrics that measure developer productivity, satisfaction, and velocity—then using those metrics to drive data-driven decisions
- Partnering closely with engineering, platform teams, and other stakeholders to deliver high-impact improvements to our SDLC
- Evaluating emerging technologies (including AI-assisted coding tools) and determining if/when they should be integrated into our workflows
This is a strategic role within the Trade Desk Development Platform organization where you will be leading deeply technical projects and providing hands-on leadership in a complex, fast-paced environment.
WHAT YOU BRING TO THE TABLE:
REQUIRED:
- 7+ years of Product Management experience shipping developer tools, platforms, or infrastructure products at enterprise scale
- Proven track record shipping products where software engineers are your primary customers – not business users, not external consumers, but developers
- Deep working knowledge of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC): You can articulate the challenges and best practices across local development, source control, CI/CD, code review, testing, deployment, and monitoring
- Experience conducting technical discovery directly with engineering teams – you don't need engineers to translate for you; you can hold technical conversations with Staff and Principal engineers
- Demonstrated "working backwards" from internal customers to build long-term strategies and solutions that measurably improve developer productivity
- Proven track record of partnering with engineering teams to solve complex, technical problems and delivering large, impactful software projects with measurable business outcomes (e.g., "reduced deployment time by 40%," "decreased build failures by 25%")
- Excellent communication skills: You can participate confidently in very technical conversations, drive consensus and commitment across teams, and crisply communicate delivery timelines, trade-offs, and risks to senior management
STRONGLY PREFERRED:
- Background in DevOps, Platform Engineering, Developer Productivity, or Developer Experience organizations
- Experience with metrics-driven optimization of developer workflows (build time reduction, deployment frequency, change failure rate, etc.)
- Hands-on familiarity with modern development tools and workflows: IDEs, source code repositories (Git/GitHub), build systems, containerization, deployment frameworks
- Understanding of AI tooling in developer workflows (GitHub Copilot, cursor.ai, MCP servers, agent frameworks) and how they impact the SDLC
- Durability and grit – sometimes solutions take creative thinking, multiple iterations, and staging while dependencies solidify. You try many different approaches to find the right answer
- Enthusiasm for all things developer tools, DevOps, emerging technologies, and a desire to stay on top of industry trends
The Trade Desk does not accept unsolicited resumes from search firm recruiters. Fees will not be paid in the event a candidate submitted by a recruiter without an agreement in place is hired; such resumes will be deemed the sole property of The Trade Desk. The Trade Desk is an equal opportunity employer. All aspects of employment will be based on merit, competence, performance, and business needs. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, marital status, age, national origin, ancestry, physical or mental disability, medical condition, pregnancy, genetic information, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, veteran status, or any other status protected under federal, state, or local law.
[LA JOBS ONLY] The Trade Desk will consider qualified applicants with criminal histories for employment in a manner consistent with the requirements of the Los Angeles Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring, Ordinance No. 184652.
[SF JOBS ONLY] Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.
CO, CA, IL, NY, WA, and Washington DC residents only: In accordance with CO, CA, IL, NY, WA, and Washington DC law, the range provided is The Trade Desk's reasonable estimate of the base compensation for this role. The actual amount may differ based on non-discriminatory factors such as experience, knowledge, skills, abilities, and location. All employees may be eligible to become The Trade Desk shareholders through eligibility for stock-based compensation grants, which are awarded to employees based on company and individual performance. The Trade Desk also offers other compensation depending on the role such as variable compensation-based incentives and commissions. Plus, expected benefits for this role include comprehensive healthcare (medical, dental, and vision) with premiums paid in full for employees and dependents, retirement benefits such as a 401k plan and company match, short and long-term disability coverage, basic life insurance, well-being benefits, reimbursement for certain tuition expenses, parental leave, sick time of 1 hour per 30 hours worked, vacation time for full-time employees up to 120 hours thru the first year and 160 hours thereafter, and around 13 paid holidays per year. Employees can also purchase The Trade Desk stock at a discount through The Trade Desk’s Employee Stock Purchase Plan.
The Trade Desk also offers a competitive benefits package. Click here to learn more.
Note: Interns are not eligible for variable incentive awards such as stock-based compensation, retirement plan, vacation, tuition reimbursement or parental leave
At the Trade Desk, Base Salary is one part of our competitive total compensation and benefits package and is determined using a salary range. The base salary range for this role is
$151,100—$277,000 USD
As an Equal Opportunity Employer, The Trade Desk is committed to creating an inclusive hiring experience where everyone has the opportunity to thrive.
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