Software Engineering Lead, Affiliate Engineering

📋 Description

• • At Trellis, we are revolutionizing the insurance industry by bringing clarity, ease, and a customer-first approach to a traditionally complex space. As the tech company behind Savvy, our licensed insurance agency, we leverage powerful tools, clean design, and a deep understanding of user needs to make insurance shopping refreshingly effortless. We are a profitable, fast-growing Series A startup, backed by prominent investors including General Catalyst, QED, NYCA, and Amex Ventures. Operating as a remote-first organization across the US and Canada, we foster a culture of rapid iteration, bold experimentation, and intentional development. If you are seeking a role where you can make a significant impact, thrive in dynamic and sometimes ambiguous environments, and collaborate with exceptional colleagues, Trellis offers the ideal platform to do your best work.
• • Reporting directly to Thomas Boquet, Head of Real-Time Bidding, the Software Engineering Lead, Affiliate Engineering will be instrumental in managing all technical aspects of our relationships and integrations with our affiliate partners. These partners are critical to our business, providing millions of leads, clicks, and calls on a daily basis. This role serves as the primary technical liaison, ensuring that these partnerships are not only deeply integrated but also operate at peak performance and are subject to continuous improvement. Your core mission is to ensure our real-time bidding infrastructure functions flawlessly, achieving three key objectives:
• • First, seamless connectivity with dozens of affiliate platforms is paramount. This ensures we gain access to the broadest possible spectrum of high-quality inventory, which is essential for our growth and success. You will be responsible for the technical architecture and implementation that facilitates these connections, ensuring they are robust and scalable.
• • Second, the accurate and reliable reception, validation, and routing of inbound data from affiliate requests through to our sophisticated machine learning models is a critical function. This involves building and maintaining data pipelines that are resilient, efficient, and capable of handling high volumes of real-time data. You will need to implement rigorous validation checks to ensure data integrity at every stage.
• • Third, maintaining a high degree of integration reliability, visibility, and performance across all affiliate channels is non-negotiable. This requires proactive monitoring, performance tuning, and the development of alerting mechanisms to identify and address potential issues before they impact business operations. You will be the guardian of our affiliate data flow, ensuring its health and efficiency.
• • Your initial goals will focus on establishing and strengthening these critical partnerships and systems. A primary objective is to ensure every affiliate partner can successfully integrate with our API. This will be achieved by acting as a responsive, knowledgeable, and supportive technical partner throughout their onboarding and integration journey. You will systematically identify, diagnose, and resolve bugs and gaps within existing integrations, ensuring a smooth and efficient experience for our partners.
• • Furthermore, you will proactively work to deepen our existing integrations with every affiliate. This involves evolving our API to expose richer capabilities and unlock access to more valuable inventory. You will collaborate directly with affiliate partners to identify and capitalize on opportunities to expand both the volume and the quality of traffic we receive, fostering mutually beneficial growth.
• • Building comprehensive visibility and confidence in our data pipeline is another key initial goal. This entails thoroughly documenting, understanding, and meticulously monitoring the entire data flow, from the initial inbound API requests all the way through to our machine learning models. You will proactively track integration performance metrics, identify trends, and surface potential issues before they escalate into significant business problems, ensuring data integrity and operational stability.
• • This role is almost entirely backend-focused, demanding extensive experience in backend engineering. You should be adept at applying best practices in Python/FastAPI, comfortable working with high-throughput real-time systems, and proficient in deploying and operating services on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Strong communication skills are essential, as you will engage extensively with external affiliate partners. Clear, professional, and effective written and verbal communication will be key, requiring good judgment to navigate technical discussions with partners of varying levels of technical sophistication and organizational complexity.
• • Success in this role also hinges on a strong process orientation and the ability to multitask effectively. You will be managing numerous simultaneous workstreams, including active integrations, in-flight debugging, API evolution projects, and ongoing partner relationship management. Designing and maintaining appropriately scaled processes will be crucial to keep all initiatives on track without compromising quality or missing critical details. An extraordinary eye for detail is indispensable, given that real-time bidding is an unforgiving environment where even a single malformed field or misconfigured parameter can silently degrade performance or revenue. Finally, a robust QA mindset is expected, as you will be responsible for building and maintaining comprehensive testing and validation practices to ensure integrations function correctly end-to-end, especially as we scale to accommodate more affiliates and diverse inventory types.