Senior Backend Engineer, Ads Platform

About the role

We are building an advertising and monetization platform that enables merchants and brands to reach customers through sponsored listings, banners, and targeted promotions across Bolt Food.

As a Backend Engineer, you will drive the development of the core systems powering Ads — from building scalable services for ad serving, bidding, and pricing, to integrating sponsored content into our existing ranking and delivery infrastructure. You'll design and implement high-performance APIs, real-time decision systems, and data pipelines that ensure ads are relevant, efficient, and seamlessly embedded into the user experience.

This is a foundational role: you'll be one of the early engineers shaping the Ads & Monetization platform, working closely with Product, Data Science, and other Engineering teams to define architecture, establish best practices, and build systems that scale with the business.

Main tasks and responsibilities

• Architect, design, and operate scalable, low-latency services for ad serving, auctions, bidding, and pricing across Bolt Food
• Integrate sponsored listings, banners, and targeted promotions into Bolt's existing ranking and delivery infrastructure
• Build real-time decision systems and data pipelines for targeting, relevance, budget pacing, and campaign reporting, ensuring accurate billing and spend tracking
• Design high-performance APIs for merchants, advertisers, and internal teams
• Set the technical direction for the Ads & Monetization domain and establish engineering standards as one of its founding engineers
• Partner with Product, Data Science, and Commerce to take ads features from idea to launch

• You have solid backend engineering experience and a track record of designing and shipping scalable, reliable, high-throughput systems
• Experience with ads platforms, real-time bidding/auctions, marketplaces, search/ranking, or recommendation systems is a strong advantage
• You feel at home with microservice architecture and are experienced in API design, possess a solid understanding of algorithms and data structures, and care about latency and performance trade-offs
• You have empathy for stakeholders and end-users, and thrive in an environment with a fast feedback cycle

Nice to have

• Experience with event streaming, data pipelines, or experimentation/A-B testing is a plus
• Previous technical leadership or tech-lead experience is a plus

• Accelerate your professional growth with unique career opportunities. Be the one of founding engineers of a new and complex product
• Enjoy a rewarding salary and stock options, knowing that as Bolt succeeds, so do you.
• Take care of your physical and mental health with our wellness perks.
• Celebrate 5 years at Bolt with a 1-month paid sabbatical to recharge.
• Connect with colleagues at annual company events and smaller team gatherings.
• Balance flexibility and in-person collaboration with our hybrid model, including at least 12 monthly in-office days.