Software Engineer, Infrastructure

About Topsort

Topsort is the leading Retail Media Infrastructure company - we're democratizing the auction-based ad technology that was once exclusive to Amazon, Google, and Alibaba, and making it accessible to retailers, marketplaces, and delivery apps in 40+ countries worldwide. Our APIs power native sponsored listings, dynamic banners, and clean-room attribution at scale — all privacy-first, all real-time.

We're a fast-growing, global-first team of ~100 people across Boston, Santiago, São Paulo, Barcelona, Sydney, and beyond. We move fast, we build in the open, and we hold a high bar — especially on infrastructure.

Why Topsort? Why now?

Topsort is changing the way Retail Media works. By joining our scaling team, you'll feel your impact from day 1. The processes and messaging you build today will be a critical part of our foundation as we accelerate toward 200 Topsorters worldwide, and your innovations will leave a lasting mark on the industry, as a whole. Retail Media is on the verge of a new era, and Topsort is gathering the ecosystem together to shape a brighter future. Joining us now, you'll work directly alongside our co-founders and founding members to bring on Retail Media 3.0. If you're looking to define your career as something greater than yourself, come scale with us.

What it’s like to work at Topsort

Our team is all about straightforward communication, embracing feedback without taking it personally, and fostering a super collaborative environment. It’s a sports team that’s hyper focused on winning, collaborative internally, and competitive externally - never the other way around.

We thrive on working in the open, lifting each other up, and getting things done with a sense of urgency. We're the kind of team that loves making bold choices, sharing extraordinary opinions, and maintaining a 100 mph pace. No endless meetings here – if it can be done today, we're all about getting it done today.

What is this role like?

We're hiring a Software Engineer for our Infrastructure team — the backbone of everything Topsort runs on. This is not a supporting role. Infrastructure at Topsort is a first-class, mission-critical function. When our infrastructure is healthy, every retailer and marketplace our customers serve gets fast, reliable, and fair auction results. When it's not, we feel it everywhere.

You'll be building and owning the systems that power our real-time auction engine, API platform, and internal developer tooling — at a scale and reliability standard that leaves no room for sloppiness. We need someone who treats production like it matters, because it does.

What You'll Do

• Own the platform - Design, build, and maintain the foundational infrastructure that every Topsort product and engineering team depends on, from compute and networking to deployment and observability.
• Raise reliability - Define and enforce SLOs, build alerting systems that catch issues before customers do, and lead postmortems that actually prevent recurrence.
• Make deployments boring - Build CI/CD pipelines and deployment systems that are so reliable they're invisible. Automate the toil out of every release.
• Manage infrastructure as code - Own our cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP) through Terraform or equivalent — no snowflake servers, no manual configuration drift.
• Enable developers - Build internal tooling and platform capabilities that make every Topsort engineer faster, safer, and more autonomous. Your customers are your colleagues.
• Harden security - Implement and enforce security best practices at the infrastructure level — secrets management, network policies, RBAC, supply chain integrity.
• Scale proactively - Capacity plan, load test, and tune our systems ahead of demand — not in reaction to a page at 2am.
• Participate in on-call - We take production seriously. You'll join the on-call rotation and be expected to respond, resolve, and document.

What We Think You Need to Be Successful

We’re open to candidates who don’t check every box but show strong potential.

• Bachelor's in Computer Science, engineering or a related field from top schools
• 2–5 years of software engineering experience with a meaningful portion focused on infrastructure, platform, or SRE work
• Solid hands-on experience with Kubernetes in production — not a homelab, not a tutorial, but real clusters under real load
• Experience with at least one major cloud provider (AWS preferred) and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform or similar)
• Strong fundamentals in distributed systems — you understand CAP theorem, eventual consistency, and failure modes before they happen
• Experience building or maintaining CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, ArgoCD, or similar)
• Comfort with observability tooling — metrics, logs, traces — and the discipline to use them proactively
• A security-conscious mindset: you think about blast radius, principle of least privilege, and secrets rotation without being asked

You'll stand out if you have:

• Experience in high-throughput, low-latency systems (ad tech, fintech, real-time bidding, or similar)
• Familiarity with service mesh, eBPF, or advanced Kubernetes networking
• Experience with database infrastructure and data streaming
• A track record of improving developer experience and reducing time-to-deploy
• Experience at a high-growth startup where infra had to scale faster than the team