Staff Software Engineer - Performance Advisor

The role

You will design, build and run production systems for forecasting, recommendations and agentic AI workflows. You will own services from design through on-call and incident response, and provide technical leadership across teams.

What you will do

• Design, build and operate systems for forecasting, recommendations and agentic AI workflows in production.
• Write production-quality code daily and own services end-to-end, including on-call and incident resolution.
• Architect low-latency, high-throughput services including APIs, data pipelines, model inference and agent orchestration.
• Build and maintain production-grade agentic applications, including tool-using agents, workflow orchestration and guardrails.
• Select LLMs and deployment patterns based on latency, cost and reliability tradeoffs.
• Champion observability and reliability through metrics, logging, tracing, alerting and post-incident analysis.
• Lead production incident response, retrospectives and systemic fixes.
• Identify architectural risks early and make design decisions that prevent outages and scalability issues.
• Reduce complexity across services, infrastructure and processes.
• Provide technical guidance across teams and take part in architectural reviews.

Required qualifications

• 12+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating production-grade distributed systems.
• Track record of hands-on ownership of business-critical services with measurable improvements in latency, throughput, stability or cost.
• Deep expertise in systems design, including service boundaries, concurrency, data modeling, failure handling and scalability tradeoffs.
• Production experience supporting machine learning-driven systems such as forecasting or recommendations, with emphasis on serving, pipelines and infrastructure.
• Expert-level experience with AWS, including designing, deploying and operating large-scale cloud-native systems.
• Strong hands-on experience with Kubernetes, containerized microservices and modern CI/CD pipelines.
• Experience operating software in both on-prem data center and AWS cloud environments.
• Fluency with modern AI-assisted development tools such as Cursor or GitHub Copilot.
• 2+ years of experience in Python and proficiency in one or more backend languages such as Python, Java, Go or Scala.
• Bachelor's or master's degree in computer science, mathematics or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Benefits

• Unlimited PTO
• Excellent medical, dental and vision coverage
• Employee equity
• Employee discounts
• Virtual wellness classes
• Pet insurance
• And more

About the company

Zeta Global is an AI-powered marketing cloud that uses artificial intelligence and consumer signals to help marketers acquire, grow and retain customers. It was founded in 2007 and is headquartered in New York City with offices around the world.