The Trade Desk
Internet
1001-5000 Employees
3.9 (Glassdoor)
Claimed
Manages Culture Code and Employee Benefits
About The Trade Desk
The Trade Desk is a technology company that empowers buyers of advertising around the world. Founded by the pioneers of real-time bidding, The Trade Desk offers a self-service technology platform to manage data-driven digital advertising campaigns. Buyers can create highly personalized ad experiences across various channels, including display, native, video, audio, and social, and on a multitude of devices, including computers, mobile, and TV.
Advertising campaigns powered by The Trade Desk take advantage of market-leading targeting capabilities, full-funnel attribution, and detailed reporting that illustrates the consumer journey from initial impression to conversion.
Headquartered in Ventura, California, The Trade Desk has 23 global offices across USA, Europe, and Asia.
Advertising campaigns powered by The Trade Desk take advantage of market-leading targeting capabilities, full-funnel attribution, and detailed reporting that illustrates the consumer journey from initial impression to conversion.
Headquartered in Ventura, California, The Trade Desk has 23 global offices across USA, Europe, and Asia.
The Trade Desk Culture Code
Product Love
Top
We are uniquely positioned as we're building a product for both internal & external users. In Singapore particularly, we have a team of traders who use our product daily so that engineers get an opportunity to understand real-world problems our users face by simply going a few rows of desks and talking to those folks!
We have a unique process where engineers, product, customer services and others present features and areas they think engineering should focus on, ensuring a bottom-up process of developing and pushing our product even further.
We have a unique process where engineers, product, customer services and others present features and areas they think engineering should focus on, ensuring a bottom-up process of developing and pushing our product even further.
Engineering-Led
Top
We are a product company and our engineers are the superstars in the ranks. We put a lot of focus on automation and ensuring we use the right tools for the job. We have teams dedicated to bringing Developer Experience to the next level, ensuring we can automate things that otherwise would have to be done manually.
Do you need a new environment? Just send a slack message to our CloudSpin bot - you'll have a fresh environment with production-like data within 30 minutes!
Do you need a new environment? Just send a slack message to our CloudSpin bot - you'll have a fresh environment with production-like data within 30 minutes!
Internal Promotion & Mobility
Top
At The Trade Desk, we have a very well-defined career model that cuts across all levels & career paths in Engineering. We make it very transparent and open right from the interview process about how individuals can grow their careers once they decide to join.
Many tech companies require individual contributors -- passionate coders -- to move to a managerial role to get promoted & grow their careers. We believe you should have the freedom to follow your passion, be it coding, managing people or perhaps both, and the company should offer you room to grow!
Second, we believe in fostering the right environment around you. If you think your skills will be better suited to another team we are fully supportive and committed to offering internal mobility options, where you can be more selective on which areas of the platform you want to contribute.
Many tech companies require individual contributors -- passionate coders -- to move to a managerial role to get promoted & grow their careers. We believe you should have the freedom to follow your passion, be it coding, managing people or perhaps both, and the company should offer you room to grow!
Second, we believe in fostering the right environment around you. If you think your skills will be better suited to another team we are fully supportive and committed to offering internal mobility options, where you can be more selective on which areas of the platform you want to contribute.
Open Communication
Top
Openness is one of the core values of The Trade Desk. We believe in open communication and transparency in decision-making. We have bi-weekly all-hands where each department has a chance to speak about their achievements, so you'll get to hear and see how we perform with our clients and what new businesses we bring almost every other week!
On top of that, we run Engineering all-hands every 2 weeks, where you'll get a chance to speak to and hear from leaders of the organisation, asking & answering questions people have.
We encourage everyone to ask difficult questions and voice their opinions either in a public forum or through more private conversations, depending on everyone's confidence levels.
On top of that, we run Engineering all-hands every 2 weeks, where you'll get a chance to speak to and hear from leaders of the organisation, asking & answering questions people have.
We encourage everyone to ask difficult questions and voice their opinions either in a public forum or through more private conversations, depending on everyone's confidence levels.
Conscious Work-Life Balance
Top
At the core, The Trade Desk is a distributed company. We believe in building distributed teams across various locations, which allows working on cool & global features from every region in the world.
At the same time, we put very conscious effort to organise teams such that there is no overhead of vastly different timezones within the same team. You will find that everyone is very conscious of everyone's working hours and people will avoid putting in meetings outside of their normal working hours.
We believe that every employee is a key to our success, there's no doubt about that, but we also believe your personal life matters and is more important to you than anything else. We foster a culture that promotes a healthy approach to work and flexible working arrangements. We understand everyone's circumstances are different, so we don't have a prescription for the working arrangement for our employees. It is between you, your team and your manager to find a healthy balance!
At the same time, we put very conscious effort to organise teams such that there is no overhead of vastly different timezones within the same team. You will find that everyone is very conscious of everyone's working hours and people will avoid putting in meetings outside of their normal working hours.
We believe that every employee is a key to our success, there's no doubt about that, but we also believe your personal life matters and is more important to you than anything else. We foster a culture that promotes a healthy approach to work and flexible working arrangements. We understand everyone's circumstances are different, so we don't have a prescription for the working arrangement for our employees. It is between you, your team and your manager to find a healthy balance!
The Trade Desk Culture Code QnA
<div>The build is fully automated once a merge request is created. The build process will also cover unit testing, component testing and end-to-end testing.</div>
<div>We have a very comprehensive process to improve the code quality starting from the code review process. Depending on the scope of the change, you need at least one main code reviewer to review and approve the code, who will take the same responsibility for any future bugs discovered in the changes. You may also need to get steward reviews if the code changes are affecting other scrum teams' functionality. And finally, the scrum master's review will ensure compliance with SOX.</div>
<div>Every engineer gets to participate in the on-call routine. Your only responsibility will be to take care of production issues, and you will be excluded from your usual scrum. The primary on-call schedule is Monday to Friday during normal working hours. We also support a secondary on-call person, who also supports weekends. On average, an engineer can expect to be assigned on-call 3-4 times a year.</div>
<div>A typical story starts with a problem definition, and the ticket owner will start talking to relevant stewards and stakeholders to understand the full scope of the problem. <br><br>The development will start with a design document, and the stewards and code reviewers will come in and review the document before the actual development starts. Once the design is finalized, the owner will implement the solution and get it reviewed by the code reviewer/stewards.<br><br>Depending on the nature of the problem, it might also require production testing on top of the usually automated unit/component testing. <br><br>Once all parties are satisfied, the code is merged to master and wait for the next pipeline of the release.</div>
<div>Usually, we keep tickets open for less than one week. We may have a minor change which causes less than one day to finish. While we could also work on multiple tickets in parallel, those tickets will keep open for more than two weeks.</div>
<div>Every newcomer will join a Bootcamp team where they'll spend roughly 2 months learning company processes, meeting people, making connections and solving non-critical tickets. During this, your focus is to learn and not to deliver, so you will have plenty of material to learn from about the company culture and our values. Once you have completed Bootcamp, you will be transitioned into your target team.</div>
<div>Pair programming depends on each scrum team's practice - one of the teams has two sessions per week and the host is voluntary. The team will gather in zoom and the host will start to tackle a problem that he wishes to share, and everyone will pump in the ideas in the session.</div>
<div>We have daily scrum meetings that update the status of the tasks within the team.</div>
<div>Before we start a new project, we will have one or more spike tickets. We investigate how we achieve the project, we may collect materials, talk with people across the team, and make a design with the project. At the same time, we will give a developing and testing plan and estimate the points we will take. <br><br>Based on the current developing resources and business expectations, we set deadlines for the project. We could have multiple stages for the project to ensure everything is on track.</div>
<div>Each year we run a company-wide annual review process. Each engineer's performance will be assessed against our well-defined career model using multiple meaningful metrics by their manager. On top of that, we have a mid-year review governed by the same rules as the annual review, so you have a clear picture of how you're performing. <br><br>In addition, we encourage all our managers to have weekly 1-on-1 with their direct reports and have ongoing conversations about their performance.</div>
<div>A great example is the recent COVID pandemic: the company has provided support in different areas like subsidizing mobile/internet for employees working from home, providing access to the mental health program, and giving additional rest days during the COVID period. <br><br>Also, the R&D all-hands session has a Q&A session for engineers to voice their concerns anonymously, and their feedback is taken very seriously.</div>
<div>Yes, definitely! Many engineers managed to change their team/role through the years in the company.</div>
<div>We have one virtual meetup each week. Normally, we order some food, play online games and gossip.</div>
<div>Managers are very open in this regard. There are R&D all hands which usually have a Q&A session for engineers to have anonymous questions.</div>
