Lead Software Engineer – Real-Time Events

The role

You will design, build and operate the real-time events pipeline for the Zeta Marketing Platform. This is a hands-on individual contributor role that ingests, processes and delivers high-volume event data.

What you will do

• Design, implement and launch event-pipeline features in production; own architecture for the parts you lead
• Evaluate existing or emerging technologies where they offer a clear cost, latency or operational advantage
• Engage in architectural discussions, take ownership of key pipeline projects and define stable contracts with downstream consumers
• Mentor through design reviews, code reviews and pairing
• Partner with Product, Data and ZMP consumer teams to turn SLAs into working systems
• Instrument services, improve alerting, own on-call gaps and drive post-incident fixes

Required qualifications

• 8-10 years in software engineering, including Lead or Staff-level work on event, streaming or data-infrastructure systems
• Production experience with event streaming (Kafka or equivalent)
• Production experience with Python services and APIs (e.g. FastAPI)
• Pipeline processing experience (Spark/EMR or equivalent) where needed
• Cloud experience designing, deploying and operating systems on AWS (S3, SQS/SNS, Lambda, RDS and similar)
• Experience with the full software development lifecycle, from design through production, monitoring and on-call
• Fluency in Python, or substantial experience in Scala and Java
• Experience with data stores used around event pipelines (e.g. Postgres/MySQL, Redis, DynamoDB or similar)
• Experience with orchestrators such as Apache Airflow
• Track record owning high-throughput pipelines in production: incidents, performance and cost, observability, data quality and SLOs
• Excellent interpersonal and communication skills; can explain pipeline design and trade-offs to partners

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 is headquartered in New York City with offices around the world.