Dave Pickles

Dave Pickles is the co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of The Trade Desk, the independent demand-side platform he helped build from the ground up into one of the most technically sophisticated programmatic advertising platforms in the world. As the primary architect of The Trade Desk's technology stack, Pickles has overseen the engineering of systems capable of processing over 10 million bid requests per second with sub-100-millisecond latency — a feat that places The Trade Desk among the most demanding real-time computing environments in any industry. His work has been foundational to the company's ability to compete against far larger, vertically integrated rivals while maintaining independence from walled gardens. Pickles co-founded The Trade Desk in 2009 alongside Jeff Green, bringing deep expertise in distributed systems and high-performance computing to the nascent programmatic advertising space. His engineering philosophy has emphasized building proprietary infrastructure rather than relying on third-party components, giving The Trade Desk a durable technical moat. Under his leadership, the platform has expanded to support display, video, mobile, audio, and connected TV channels, with machine learning and AI increasingly embedded into bidding and optimization workflows. He has also played a key role in the company's approach to identity resolution and data privacy, including work related to Unified ID 2.0. As a relatively private technical executive, Pickles is less visible on the conference circuit than many of his peers but is widely respected within engineering and AdTech circles for the scale and reliability of the systems he has built. The Trade Desk's consistent uptime and performance during high-demand periods — including major live sports and tentpole events on CTV — reflect the robustness of the infrastructure he has championed. His contributions have been integral to The Trade Desk's growth from a startup to a publicly traded company with a market capitalization that has at times exceeded $40 billion.

• B.S. Computer Science, University of Colorado

• Co-founded The Trade Desk in 2009, which grew into a publicly traded company (NASDAQ: TTD) with a peak market cap exceeding $40 billion
• Architected a bidding platform capable of processing over 10 million bid requests per second with sub-100ms response times
• Built proprietary infrastructure enabling The Trade Desk to operate independently from major walled garden ecosystems
• Led technical development supporting The Trade Desk's expansion into Connected TV, a channel that became a major growth driver