Staff Product Manager, Budget and Pacing

The Trade Desk is a global technology company and the world’s leading independent platform for digital advertising, with over 3,000 employees across more than 30 offices. Our technology helps advertisers reach the right audiences across the open internet — from streaming TV and podcasts to mobile apps, news, and more.

Advertising powers the content people love. By making it more transparent, effective, and responsible, we help support trusted journalism, quality entertainment, and creators worldwide. The world’s brands and agencies rely on us to reach their customers and grow their businesses responsibly.

The scale of our platform brings unique technical challenges — from processing massive datasets in real time to building systems that operate reliably on a global scale. When you work here, your impact is worldwide. We welcome diverse perspectives, encourage curiosity, and build teams that learn from one another. If you’re driven to solve meaningful challenges, we’d love to meet you.

WHO WE ARE LOOKING FOR Every campaign on our platform has a budget and a flight, and our pacing system decides in real time how to spend it against 20M queries per second. Our job is to bid the right amount on every impression and at the right rate, so advertisers spend their budget in full and get the most value from it.

We are looking for an experienced product manager that understands the full lifecycle of a campaign, from an IO all the way to reporting. Pacing behaves differently depending on how the inventory is bought, whether that’s open auction, deals or commitments, and on the channel it runs in, with live events adding constraints of their own. Your job is to make the system handle all of it without the advertiser having to think about any of it.

You will work with our CS & BD teams to understand customer needs, execute on them with the engineering, UX and applied science teams then collaborate with GTM & PMM teams to bring them to life and drive adoption. You will be responsible for ensuring that clients can setup their campaign flights according to their needs and that our system executes on it seamlessly.

Budget & Pacing are the most critical aspects within an advertising campaign. Empowering the advertisers/agencies with the right set of tools to create & manage their flight budgets and ensuring that our pacing system is decisioning on every single one of the 20M QPS to maximize value & spend budgets in full is not an easy feat. We are looking for an experienced product manager that understands the full lifecycle of a campaign, from an IO all the way to reporting.

Understanding the full ecosystem including live events, deals, commitments, across different types of channels is important.

If you have depth in systems that decide in real time where money goes outside of Ad Tech, such as trading, payments, or marketplace pricing, we want to hear from you.

You will work with our CS & BD teams to understand customer needs, execute on them with the engineering, UX and applied science teams then collaborate with GTM & PMM teams to bring them to life and drive adoption. You will be responsible for ensuring that clients can setup their campaign flights according to their needs and that our system executes on it seamlessly.

WHAT YOU WILL BE DOING

• Own product strategy and execution for TTD’s Budget & Pacing system, from the UX experience all the way to our pacing controllers.
• Collaborate with numerous product teams across our platform to ensure that they can ship their features safely without disrupting spend on the platform.
• Go deep on the core pacing engine: the controllers that decide how budget is spent over time, and the algorithms that allocate it across ad groups and channels.
• Partner with applied science on pacing and bidding algorithms, and be able to dig deep into technically complex areas.
• Own the intake surface for every team whose features touch spend, including live events, inventory, supply path optimization, deals and others
• Build the roadmap from direct contact with traders and agencies
• Define how we measure pacing quality, and prove changes through experimentation

WHAT YOU BRING TO THE TABLE

• 7+ years in product management, with at least 2 in ad tech, or 4 in a field with directly translatable mechanics such as high-frequency trading, fintech, marketplace pricing, or yield management.
• Technical depth sufficient to challenge engineering and applied science on design decisions. Comfort reading algorithm specs and reasoning about control loops and allocation logic.
• Understanding of the full campaign lifecycle, from IO through flight setup to delivery and reporting, or a demonstrated ability to get there fast.
• Experience owning a production system where correctness and scale both matter, and where a bad decision shows up in someone’s money.
• A track record of shipping through teams you do not control.
• Direct customer contact in a prior role, translating what users actually want into requirements.
• Plus: real-time bidding, auction mechanics, budget pacing, or constrained allocation at scale.
• 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.
• In accordance with various US state laws, 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, 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

$201,400 — $251,800 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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