About Surfside

Surfside powers the infrastructure, APIs, and software that enable retailers to rapidly build custom ad platforms—encompassing personalized commerce, native ads, sponsored listings, and more.

Our technology empowers retailers to personalize, grow, and monetize their customer experiences, while providing brands and advertisers a robust performance channel to reach high-intent consumers.

Role Overview

As a Senior Software Engineer, you will help design and scale the systems powering Surfside’s Advertising OS. You will work closely with clients and partners to understand their integration needs and develop solutions that ensure seamless data exchange and functionality. This role requires strong technical acumen, problem-solving skills, and excellent communication abilities. You’ll work on high-throughput backend services, event-driven infrastructure, and extensible APIs that support autonomous marketing systems. If you’re excited about the intersection of AI, ad tech, and modern distributed systems, we’d love to meet you.

What You’ll be Building

AI-Centric Campaign Management

- Build declarative APIs for AI agents to define budgets, targeting, creatives, and goals in one pass.
- Develop a scalable rules engine to support dynamic bidding, creative variation, and segmentation.

High-Performance Bidding & Optimization

- Architect low-latency, configurable bidding systems integrated with AI decision engines.
- Stream real-time performance signals back into AI systems for feedback and continuous learning.

Data Integration, Measurement & Insights

- Design streaming data pipelines (Kafka, etc.) to unify 1P, 2P, and 3P data into a real-time decision layer.
- Implement robust multi-touch attribution models and in-platform analytics frameworks.

Governance, Compliance & Security

- Enforce privacy and compliance guardrails across all AI-driven decision-making (GDPR, CCPA, etc.).
- Build cost, performance, and brand-safety controls to manage autonomous actions.

Platform Extensibility & Developer Experience

- Ship modern APIs, event endpoints, and SDKs to empower internal teams, partners, and AI modules.
- Support a plugin architecture to integrate specialized capabilities like custom ML models or brand safety checks.

What We’re Looking For

5+ years building distributed, event-driven backend systems at scale.
Deep experience with TypeScript/Node.js, Kubernetes, streaming data systems (Kafka, Flink, or similar).
Strong systems design skills, particularly in real-time architecture, microservices, and cloud-native environments.
Familiarity with advertising concepts such as bidding, frequency capping, attribution, and creative optimization—strong plus.
Understanding of privacy, governance, and data security in regulated environments.
Comfortable working cross-functionally with product, AI/ML, and platform teams.

Why Join Surfside

Build the infrastructure powering AI-native advertising platforms.
Take on deep technical challenges in low-latency systems, real-time data, and personalization.
Contribute to a flexible, modern engineering culture with room for ownership and experimentation.
Competitive salary, meaningful equity, and benefits.

Equal Opportunity Statement

Surfside is an Equal Opportunity Employer and recognizes that a diverse workforce is crucial to our success as a business. We encourage and welcome you to apply irrespective of age, gender identity, race, religion, sexual orientation, color, pregnancy, family responsibilities, national and social origin, political opinion, marital, veteran, or disability status.

Location: Remote
Salary Range: Up to $180,000 annually, depending on experience and qualifications

Senior Software Engineer - Advertising Infrastructure