Lead Software Engineer - Real-Time Events

Role Overview

Zeta Global is looking for a Lead Software Engineer to join Real-Time Events (RTE). This is a highly hands-on IC role. You will design, build, and operate the ZMP real-time events pipeline: ingesting, processing, and delivering high-volume event data that powers Zeta Marketing Platform products.

Key Responsibilities

• Technical Leadership: Design, implement, and launch event-pipeline features in production. Own architecture for the parts of the pipeline you lead.
• Thought Leadership & Innovation: Evaluate existing or emerging technologies where they offer a clear cost, latency, or operational advantage, and land those choices in production.
• Engineering Collaboration: Engage in architectural discussions, take ownership of key pipeline projects, and define stable contracts with downstream consumers.
• Team Mentorship: Mentor through design reviews, code reviews, and pairing. Help teammates ship via clear interfaces, solid tests, and production-ready patterns.
• Product Collaboration: Partner with Product, Data, and ZMP consumer teams to turn SLAs (latency, throughput, correctness) into working systems.
• Infrastructure & Reliability: Instrument services, improve alerting, and own on-call gaps yourself. Drive post-incident fixes (root cause, code, runbooks, dashboards) and keep the pipeline predictable under load.

Desired Qualifications and Expertise

• Extensive Experience: Minimum of 8-10 years in software engineering, including Lead/Staff-level work on event, streaming, or data-infrastructure systems.
• Technical Proficiency: Production experience with event streaming (Kafka or equivalent), Python services and APIs (e.g. FastAPI), and pipeline processing (Spark/EMR or equivalent) where needed.
• Cloud Expertise: Proficient in designing, deploying, and operating systems on AWS (S3, SQS/SNS, Lambda, RDS, and similar).
• Full Lifecycle Exposure: Experience with the complete software development lifecycle, from design through production, monitoring, and on-call.
• Programming Skills: Fluency in Python or substantial experience in Scala and Java.
• Database Proficiency: Skilled with data stores used around event pipelines (e.g. Postgres/MySQL, Redis, DynamoDB or similar).
• Scheduler Experience: Experience with orchestrators such as Apache Airflow.
• Operational Mindset: Track record owning high-throughput pipelines in production: incidents, performance and cost, observability, data quality, and SLOs.
• Communication Skills: Excellent interpersonal and communication abilities; can explain pipeline design and trade-offs to partners who consume ZMP event data.

Benefits & Perks

• Unlimited PTO
• Excellent medical, dental, and vision coverage
• Employee Equity
• Employee Discounts, Virtual Wellness Classes, and Pet Insurance and more!!

Salary Range

The salary range for this role is $200,000 - $210,000, depending on location and experience.

People & Culture at Zeta

We're committed to building a workplace culture of trust and belonging, so everyone feels invited to bring their whole selves to work. We provide a forum for employees to celebrate, support and advocate for one another.

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