Principal Engineer, Ads Platform

What we’re building and why we’re building it.

Fetch helps people live rewarded every day, with a vision to become the rewards destination for everyone. We turn everyday activities into meaningful rewards, whether it’s grocery shopping, grabbing a quick meal, or playing a favorite mobile game. To date, we’ve awarded more than $1 billion in Fetch Points to our users.

Each day, more than 13 million receipts are submitted on Fetch, providing visibility into over $212 billion in gross merchandise value. This creates the largest retail-agnostic, SKU-level view of household spending, powering Fetch as an outcomes-based advertising platform that helps brands acquire and retain lifelong consumers.

The Fetch app is available on the App Store and Google Play, with more than 6 million five-star reviews from a highly engaged and loyal user base.

It’s not just our users who believe in Fetch: with investments from Softbank, ICONIQ, DST, Greycroft, and partnerships ranging from challenger brands to Fortune 500 companies, Fetch is reshaping how brands and consumers connect in the marketplace. When you work at Fetch, you play a vital role in a platform that drives brand loyalty and creates lifelong consumers with the power of Fetch points. User and partner success are at the heart of everything we do, and we extend that same commitment to our employees.

At Fetch, we value curiosity, adaptability, and the confidence to explore new tools, especially AI, to drive smarter, faster work. You don’t need to be an expert, but you should be ready to learn quickly and think critically. We welcome learners who move fast, challenge the status quo, and shape what’s next, with us. Ranked as one of America’s Best Startup Employers by Forbes for two years in a row, Fetch fosters a people-first culture rooted in trust, accountability, and innovation. We encourage our employees to challenge ideas, think bigger, and always bring the fun to Fetch.

Meet Fetch Engineering

At Fetch, engineering is driven by curiosity, ownership, and a bias toward action. We operate in complex problem spaces where the right answer is not always clear, and success depends on adaptability, critical thinking, and informed decision-making. Our engineers are comfortable navigating ambiguity, understanding tradeoffs, gathering context, and turning uncertainty into progress while maintaining high technical standards.

Engineers at Fetch take pride in building reliable, scalable systems that serve millions of users. You will contribute directly to the codebase, collaborate closely with cross-functional partners, and help shape best practices that elevate the quality of our work. We foster a culture of mentorship and collaboration, where engineers grow by learning from one another and holding a high bar for quality, reliability, and impact.

About the role

Fetch is building the next generation of systems that power personalized advertising experiences for millions of users, and we're looking for a Principal Backend Engineer to help define the architecture behind them. You will design, scale, and evolve the high-throughput, low-latency distributed systems that sit on the critical path of Fetch's advertising platform. These systems must make decisions and serve experiences in real time while maintaining exceptional standards for availability, correctness, efficiency, and operational resilience.

At Fetch, Principal is the most senior individual-contributor engineering level, and only a small number of engineers operate here. You set technical direction the rest of engineering builds on, act as a technical peer to engineering leadership, and are the person brought in for the cross-organizational problems that have stalled major company initiatives and that no one else has solved. You own the long-term engineering strategy for the Ads platform and drive the fundamental technical shifts, major migrations, and architectural redesigns that unlock gains for the entire engineering organization.

The role requires deep expertise in distributed systems and backend architecture, along with a track record of solving difficult scaling problems in production. You should be comfortable reasoning about systems operating at very high request volumes, identifying bottlenecks across the stack, and designing architectures that continue to perform as traffic, data volume, and product complexity grow.

This is a hands-on, high-impact technical leadership role with influence across multiple engineering collectives. You stay in the code while operating at Principal scope, moving between architecture, implementation, debugging, strategy, and mentorship, and your work shapes how Fetch approaches distributed systems, service architecture, performance, reliability, and engineering excellence at scale.

This is a full-time role that can be held from one of our US offices or remotely in the United States.

What you’ll do at Fetch (Role Responsibilities)

• Own the platform architecture. Define the architecture of the high-throughput, low-latency systems behind ad selection, targeting, pacing, delivery, attribution, and measurement, including the calls on partitioning, caching, consistency, concurrency, and performance as the platform scales.
• Design for reliability, resilience, and operational excellence. Set how systems degrade gracefully under partial failures, traffic spikes, and downstream degradation, and establish the metrics, tracing, SLOs, and alerting that give engineering clear visibility into revenue-generating systems.
• Evolve event-driven and data-intensive architectures. Guide decisions across transactional and non-transactional stores, streaming, messaging, caching, and real-time processing, balancing consistency, durability, latency, scalability, and operational complexity.
• Set organization-level standards. Establish the architectural patterns and quality bar for service design, APIs, observability, reliability, testing, and operational readiness that teams across the org build on.
• Drive fundamental technical shifts. Identify and lead major migrations, architectural redesigns, and platform re-foundations that unlock large scalability and productivity gains for the entire engineering organization, often through difficult incremental change.
• Own long-term engineering strategy. Shape Fetch's technical direction for the Ads platform across multiple organizations, influence priorities and architecture company-wide, steer it against industry trends, and represent Fetch's technical approach in the broader engineering community.
• Solve the problems no one else can. Solve deeply complex, cross-organizational problems that block major company initiatives, operating under extreme ambiguity, and lead cross-company technical alignment across Ads, Platform, Product, Data, and ML.
• Multiply the org and mentor its leaders. Mentor staff and senior engineers, coach engineering managers and technical leaders on direction, and design coaching, feedback, and calibration systems that persist across teams and time.

In your Toolbox (Minimum Requirements)

• Significant experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed backend systems in production, with demanding throughput, latency, availability, and reliability requirements.
• Deep understanding of distributed systems: partitioning, replication, consistency models, caching, concurrency, asynchronous processing, failure modes, and coordination.
• Experience diagnosing and solving performance and scaling problems across applications, databases, caches, queues, networks, and infrastructure.
• Strong expertise with service-oriented or microservice architectures, APIs, event-driven systems, and high-volume data processing.
• Demonstrated experience making architectural tradeoffs across relational and non-relational databases, streaming platforms, caching technologies, and other distributed storage.
• Strong operational experience with production systems: observability, SLOs, incident response, capacity planning, load testing, and reliability engineering.
• Track record of driving fundamental technical shifts, such as major migrations or architectural redesigns, that improved scalability, velocity, or reliability for an entire engineering organization.
• Track record of solving deeply complex, cross-organizational problems that blocked major initiatives and that others had been unable to solve.
• Demonstrated influence on long-term engineering strategy and architecture at the organization or company level, spanning multiple teams or organizations, including translating technical tradeoffs into business outcomes.
• Experience mentoring principal and staff engineers and coaching engineering managers and technical leaders.
• Ability to remain hands-on while operating at Principal scope, moving between architecture, implementation, debugging, strategy, and mentorship.
• Fluency in modern backend and infrastructure ecosystems such as Kubernetes, event streaming, distributed data stores, cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, and observability tooling.

Nice to haves/Bonus Points (Preferred Requirements)

• Experience building or scaling advertising, ad-serving, auction, marketplace, recommendation, or other real-time decisioning systems.
• Familiarity with advertising concepts such as targeting, pacing, bidding, frequency management, attribution, incrementality, measurement, and revenue integrity.
• Experience operating at very high request rates with strict tail-latency requirements, including large-scale event streaming and real-time processing.
• Experience designing multi-region or globally distributed systems with high availability.
• Demonstrated success materially reducing infrastructure cost while increasing throughput, reliability, or performance.
• Experience building platforms that support real-time ML inference, ranking, recommendation, or personalization.
• Strong judgment on where architectural complexity is justified and where a simpler system scales further and operates more reliably.
• Influence beyond a single company, such as contributions to open source, standards bodies, or the broader technical community.

Compensation: At Fetch, we offer competitive compensation packages including base, equity, and benefits to the exceptional folks we hire. Discover our benefits and how our employees live rewarded at https://fetch.com/careers .

At Fetch, we'll give you the tools to feel healthy, happy and secure through:

• Equity: We offer full-time employees equity in Fetch, so that everyone can benefit from Fetch’s growth.
• 401k Match: Dollar-for-dollar match up to 4%.
• Benefits for humans and pets: We offer comprehensive medical, dental and vision plans for everyone including your pets.
• Continuing Education: Fetch provides ten thousand per year in education reimbursement.
• Employee Resource Groups: Take part in employee-led groups that are centered around fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace through events, dialogue and advocacy. The ERGs participate in our Inclusion Council with members of executive leadership.
• Paid Time Off: On top of our flexible PTO, Fetch observes 9 paid holidays, as well as our year-end week-long break.
• Robust Leave Policies: 20 weeks of paid parental leave for primary caregivers, 14 weeks for secondary caregivers, and a flexible return to work schedule.
• Calvin Care Cash: Employees who are welcoming new family members will also receive a one time $2,000 incentive to assist employees with covering the cost of childcare, clothing, diapers and much more!
• Flexible Work Environment: Collaborate with your team in one of our stunning offices, or you can work fully remotely from anywhere in the US. We’ll ensure you are equally equipped with the hardware and software you need to get your job done in the comfort of your home. (applicable for most roles)

Fetch is an equal opportunity employer that embraces diversity, inclusion, and respect for all individuals. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, national origin, marital status, veteran status, disability, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. Our commitment to inclusivity ensures that everyone is treated with dignity and has the opportunity to succeed based on their talent, skills, and potential.

Fetch also provides reasonable accommodations to qualified individuals with disabilities or those with sincerely held religious beliefs, as required by law. If you need assistance with the application process or require an accommodation, please contact us at accommodations@fetch.com.