Senior Backend Engineer

At Digital Turbine, we make mobile advertising experiences more meaningful and rewarding for users, app publishers, and advertisers — intelligently connecting people in more ways, across more devices. We provide app publishers and advertisers with powerful ads and experiences that captivate consumers, fuel performance, and help telecoms and OEMs supercharge awareness, acquisition, and monetization. In a rapidly evolving industry, we are constantly innovating and creating better paths of discovery to connect consumers, publishers, and advertisers across the mobile ecosystem.

Please note that Digital Turbine is a hybrid work environment-only candidates local to the posting location will be considered.

About the Role:

As a Senior Backend Engineer on the Exchange Engine team at Digital Turbine, you will be a driving force behind the core systems of our massive mobile advertising platform. You will tackle complex architectural challenges where every millisecond counts, building real-time, highly concurrent systems that process millions of requests per minute. In this position, your impact extends beyond feature implementation; you will take charge of major initiatives, architect core systems, and raise the bar for engineering excellence across the entire team.

Key Responsibilities

• Architectural Design & Execution: Lead the end-to-end design, development, and delivery of complex, scalable, and highly available backend services for our real-time ad exchange. Architect systems with a focus on long-term maintainability, ensuring that large-scale changes and migrations are predictable and low-risk.

• Performance Optimization: Profile, tune, and optimize system performance to ensure ultra-low latency and high throughput under massive concurrent loads.

• Technical Mentorship: Act as a technical multiplier by mentoring junior and mid-level engineers, conducting rigorous code reviews, shaping technical standards, and promoting software engineering best practices.

• Cross-Functional Leadership: Collaborate directly with Product Managers, Data Scientists, and other engineering squads to translate complex business requirements into robust technical solutions and to understand the revenue journey, ensuring technical decisions directly support market competitiveness and platform growth.

• Production Excellence: Own the lifecycle of your services in production. Implement advanced monitoring, alerting, and observability to troubleshoot and resolve deep-system production incidents.

• Infrastructure Collaboration: Work closely with DevOps to optimize our deployment pipelines and cloud infrastructure (Kubernetes, GCP).

• AI-Driven Engineering: Leverage modern AI coding assistants and agentic tools to accelerate development velocity, automate routine tasks, and free up cognitive load for complex architectural challenges.

Required Qualifications

• Experience: 5+ years of proven experience in backend software development, with a strong focus on large-scale distributed systems.

• Language Mastery: Expert-level proficiency in at least one statically typed backend language (Scala, Java, Kotlin, Go, Rust, C++) and a deep understanding of its underlying ecosystem (e.g., JVM internals, memory management).

• High Scale Experience: Proven track record of building and maintaining high-throughput, low-latency, real-time systems.

• System Design: Deep understanding of software architecture, microservices, and design patterns, Object-Oriented and/or Functional Programming.

• Database Expertise: Hands-on experience modeling and scaling both relational (SQL) and NoSQL databases (e.g., Redis, Cassandra, Aerospike, or Elasticsearch).

• Cloud Native: Strong experience with containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes) in a major cloud environment (AWS, GCP, or Azure).

• Education: B.Sc. in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or equivalent practical/military experience.

What Makes You Stand Out

• Experience in Ad-Tech, specifically developing an Ad Exchange, DSP, or SSP.

• Deep knowledge of reactive programming or advanced concurrency models.

• Experience with big data streaming technologies (Kafka, Flink, Spark).

About Digital Turbine:

Digital Turbine (NASDAQ: APPS) powers superior mobile consumer experiences and results for the world’s leading telcos, advertisers and publishers. Our end-to-end platform uniquely simplifies the ability to supercharge awareness, acquisition and monetization — connecting our partners to more consumers, in more ways, across more devices.

The company is headquartered in Austin, Texas, with global offices in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, Berlin, Singapore, Tel Aviv, and other cities around the world, serving top agency, app developer, and advertising markets.

We are honored to have achieved numerous awards as an employer of choice, around the world, including: BuiltIn's Best Places to Work Awards in 2022, 2023 and 2024, DUNS 100 Best Places to Work in Tech for 2023 and 2024, and BDICode's 100 Best Companies to Work in 2024.

Digital Turbine is an equal opportunity employer committed to exemplifying diversity and inclusion around the world. We welcome people of different backgrounds, experiences, abilities, and perspectives. We embed diversity in our mindset, products, and teams to empower an inclusive, equitable, and culturally fluent environment. Building and continuously fostering this culture within our teams makes us better collaborators, partners, and innovators.

Digital Turbine will process the information you provide during the application process in accordance with the Digital Turbine Global Recruitment Privacy Notice.