Staff Software Engineer Ads

About The Role

Great advertising connects merchants with customers who genuinely need what they're selling. As a Staff Software Engineer focused on Ads, you'll build the targeting and personalization technology that makes these meaningful connections happen at scale. You'll develop state of the art ad platform features that help merchants reach the right audience at exactly the right moment, creating advertising experiences that drive real business growth while respecting the customer experience.

Key Responsibilities:

• Design and optimize real‑time ad serving, auction, and ranking systems with p99 latency targets.
• Solve complex ad performance problems to identify optimization opportunities that impact millions.
• Collaborate closely with advertising data teams to integrate data driven solutions seamlessly into our ad platform.
• Ship experimentation tooling for ad A/B testing.
• Document technical insights and share best practices across engineering teams.
• Participate in on-call work to ensure reliability and performance of Shopify’s ad systems.

Qualifications:

• Strong Engineering proficiency and a passion for exploring the limits of technology.
• Strong with streaming and low‑latency systems: Kafka, Flink/Spark Streaming; feature stores; high‑QPS caches/KV stores (Redis/Aerospike/RocksDB).
• Experience in building scalable, ad-centric applications that enhance the commerce experience.
• Demonstrated problem-solving abilities and innovative thinking in ad technology solutions.
• Excellent communication skills to convey technical ideas effectively.
• A growth-oriented mindset, constantly seeking to improve and innovate.

Nice to have:

• Fluency in ads metrics and levers: CTR, CVR, CPC/CPM/CPA, eCPM, ROAS, LTV, win rate, fill rate, pacing accuracy—and how to move them.

About Shopify:

Opportunity is not evenly distributed. Shopify puts independence within reach for anyone with a dream to start a business. We propel entrepreneurs and enterprises to scale the heights of their potential. Since 2006, we’ve grown to over 8,300 employees and generated over $1 trillion in sales for millions of merchants in 175 countries.

This is life-defining work that directly impacts people’s lives as much as it transforms your own. This is putting the power of the few in the hands of the many, is a future with more voices rather than fewer, and is creating more choices instead of an elite option.

About You:

Moving at our pace brings a lot of change, complexity, and ambiguity—and a little bit of chaos. Shopifolk thrive on that and are comfortable being uncomfortable. That means Shopify is not the right place for everyone.

Before you apply, consider if you can:

• Care deeply about what you do and about making commerce better for everyone.
• Excel by seeking professional and personal hypergrowth.
• Keep up with an unrelenting pace (the week, not the quarter).
• Be resilient and resourceful in face of ambiguity and thrive on (rather than endure) change.
• Bring critical thought and opinion.
• Put AI agents and tools to work on the tasks they're built for, and focus on the work only humans can do.
• Embrace differences and disagreement to get shit done and move forward.
• Work digital-first for your daily work.

We may use AI-enabled tools to screen, select, and assess applications. All AI outputs are reviewed and validated by our recruitment team.

Interview Process: At Shopify, we pride ourselves on moving quickly—not just in shipping, but in our hiring process as well. If you're ready to apply, please be prepared to interview with us within the week. Our goal is to complete the entire interview loop within 30 days. You will be expected to complete a live pair programming session, come prepared with your own IDE.

Key skills/competency

• Staff Software Engineer
• Ads Platform
• Targeting Technology
• Personalization Technology
• Real-time Ad Serving
• Low-latency Systems
• Kafka
• Flink/Spark Streaming
• High-QPS Caches
• Ad Technology Solutions