Sr Backend Engineer

Los Angeles · USD 165,000-185,000 · 5+ years experience · Hybrid · Posted Sep 30, 2026

At a glance

Taboola empowers businesses to grow through performance advertising technology that goes beyond search and social and delivers measurable outcomes at scale.
Taboola works with thousands of businesses who advertise directly on Realize, Taboola’s powerful ad platform, reaching approximately 600M daily active users across some of the best publishers in the world. Publishers like NBC News, Yahoo, and OEMs such as Samsung, Xiaomi and others use Taboola’s technology to grow audience and revenue, enabling Realize to offer unique data, specialized algorithms, and unmatched scale.

As a Senior Backend Engineer on the R&D Team in Downtown Los Angeles, you will contribute to building and improving Taboola's recommendation infrastructure.
You will work on the backend services that drive Realize, Taboola's performance advertising platform serving 600M+ daily active users.
The services you build directly influence campaign performance and revenue outcomes for publishers and advertisers worldwide.

Work closely with the Product team and architects to reach optimal technology solutions.
Work in a SCRUM environment designing, coding, and managing integration projects from conception to completion.
Develop highly scalable backend services and robust data processing pipelines to handle billions of high-throughput events and terabytes of data daily.
Take end-to-end ownership to design, build, measure, and maintain complex backend systems, using AI coding assistants as force multipliers for rapid prototyping, feature delivery, and troubleshooting.
Mentor junior or mid-level developers.
Own the health of your services in production by monitoring performance, responding to incidents, leading root-cause analysis, and making improvements to keep services and systems reliable at scale.

Bachelor's or advanced degree in a relevant field, ideally Computer Science, Engineering, or similar.
5+ years of hands-on Java coding and experience with the Spring Framework.
Strong understanding of database and search/serving concepts, with experience in relational, NoSQL (e.g., MySQL, Cassandra).
Experience with big data processing and analytics tools (e.g., Apache Spark, Hadoop, Google BigQuery).
Experience with containerization and orchestration tools (Docker, Kubernetes).
Experience with modern version control systems (specifically Git).
Thorough understanding of backend integration concepts, microservices architecture, RESTful APIs, and event-driven messaging (e.g., Kafka, web services).
Experience building and scaling real-time search, recommendation, or vector-search pipelines (specifically using Vespa or similar technologies like Elasticsearch/Solr).
System-architecture mindset with the ability to design scalable, reliable, high-performance systems.
Experience taking end-to-end ownership of systems using AI-assisted tools (e.g., Cursor, Claude, Codex).

Experience developing models, algorithms and infrastructure to support large-scale data-mining and machine learning systems.
Experience in Python coding.

Hybrid work schedule with 3 days in-office with an option to come in more often if desired
Located in Downtown Los Angeles

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