Staff Software Engineer - Performance Advisor

The role

You will design, build and run production systems for forecasting, recommendations and AI-driven decisioning, including agentic and LLM-powered applications. 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 with tool-using agents, workflow orchestration and guardrails.
• Select LLMs and deployment patterns based on latency, cost and reliability tradeoffs.
• Champion observability and reliability: 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 to improve stability and team velocity.
• Provide technical guidance across teams and take part in architectural reviews beyond your own domain.

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 gains 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 focus on serving, pipelines and infrastructure.
• Expert-level experience with AWS, 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 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 helps marketers acquire, grow and retain customers using AI and consumer data. It is headquartered in New York City with offices around the world.