Staff Backend Engineer

As a Staff Backend Engineer, you will be a highly technical individual contributor responsible for designing, building, and optimizing the backend systems that power our low-latency ad platform. You will take the lead in developing scalable microservices and streaming data infrastructure to handle high-throughput workloads with minimal latency. This role requires deep expertise in distributed systems and real-time data processing (ideally in the programmatic advertising domain) to ensure our systems remain highly performant and reliable. You’ll work closely with product managers, data scientists, and other engineering teams to translate business needs into technical solutions and ensure the platform is fast, fault-tolerant, and observable. This role is based in the United States and can be performed remotely, with a preference for candidates who can join us in a hybrid capacity in San Francisco, New York, or Atlanta.

Responsibilities:

• System Architecture & Development: Lead the design and implementation of scalable, high-performance backend services, including microservices and APIs, that can efficiently handle large volumes of requests with low latency. Ensure the architecture accommodates real-time bidding and personalization use cases common in AdTech.
• Streaming Data Infrastructure: Develop and maintain streaming data pipelines and event-driven systems to process and analyze continuous data flows in real time (e.g., using Apache Kafka). Optimize data ingestion and processing for timeliness and accuracy to support downstream analytics and machine-learning models.
• Performance & Reliability: Ensure the backend systems are highly performant, resilient, and stable under heavy load. Implement robust fault-tolerance mechanisms and optimize for low-latency response times in a high-concurrency environment. Leverage observability best practices (comprehensive monitoring, logging, and tracing) to enable engineers to quickly analyze system behavior and take proactive measures to boost performance and reliability.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work closely with cross-functional teams – including Product, Data Science, DevOps, and Frontend – to translate business requirements into scalable technical solutions. Facilitate effective communication and collaborative problem-solving to deliver new features and improvements that align with our product roadmap.
• Technical Leadership & Mentorship: Provide technical leadership within the engineering team without direct managerial duties. Guide and mentor junior engineers through code reviews, design discussions, and best practice adoption, fostering a culture of technical excellence and continuous improvement.
• Technical Strategy & Innovation: Stay abreast of emerging technologies and industry trends (e.g. new AWS services, streaming frameworks, database technologies) and evaluate their potential benefit to our platform. Contribute to the technical roadmap, making build-vs-buy recommendations and driving innovation to keep our systems ahead of the curve.

Required Qualifications:

• 8+ years of software engineering experience building backend systems, with 3+ years in a senior or lead role (e.g. Staff Engineer, Principal Engineer) in the AdTech or a similar high-volume, low-latency domain.
• Proven track record in designing and building high-throughput, low-latency distributed systems that operate at scale (e.g. handling thousands of requests per second or more).
• Expertise in microservices architecture and distributed system design, including experience decomposing monoliths or building greenfield microservices with well-defined APIs.
• Proficiency in Java and Go for backend development, and experience with Python for scripting, automation, or data processing tasks.
• Hands-on experience with streaming data technologies and event-driven frameworks, such as Apache Kafka (or AWS Kinesis), and possibly stream processing frameworks (Spark Streaming, Flink, or similar, experience with Apache Kafka is highly desired).
• Strong experience with cloud platforms (AWS preferred) and deploying services in a cloud-native environment. Familiarity with AWS components like EC2, S3, Lambda, SNS/SQS, etc., and ability to design cost-effective, performant cloud architectures.
• Experience with both SQL and NoSQL databases for high-volume applications. Comfortable with technologies like PostgreSQL/MySQL as well as key-value or wide-column stores (e.g. DynamoDB, Cassandra, Redis) for caching and fast lookups.
• Familiarity with containerization and orchestration tools (Docker, Kubernetes) and CI/CD pipelines to build and deploy microservices reliably.
• Deep understanding of system observability and monitoring – experience instrumenting applications and using monitoring/logging tools to ensure visibility into system performance (e.g. Prometheus, Grafana, ELK stack or similar).
• Excellent problem-solving and communication skills. Ability to communicate complex technical concepts clearly to cross-functional team members and stakeholders. Proven collaboration skills in an agile development environment.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Domain Expertise: Deep knowledge of the programmatic advertising ecosystem, including how Demand-Side Platforms (DSPs), Supply-Side Platforms (SSPs), ad exchanges, and real-time bidding (RTB) work together. Prior experience building or optimizing components of a DSP or ad server is a strong plus.
• High-Scale Data Processing: Experience designing systems that operate at extreme scale, such as real-time auction systems or high-frequency trading platforms, and optimizing algorithms for latency and throughput (e.g. understanding of auction theory or bidding optimization strategies).
• Data Pipelines & Analytics: Familiarity with big data processing and analytics pipelines (Spark, Hadoop, or columnar data stores) for batch and streaming workloads. Experience with data warehousing or real-time analytics databases (e.g. Druid, ClickHouse) is a plus.
• Advanced Performance Tuning: Demonstrated experience in performance profiling and optimization (e.g. JVM tuning, concurrency, GC optimization, network I/O) in large-scale Java or Go applications.
• Leadership in the Tech Community: A track record of contributing to open-source projects, technical publications, or speaking at industry conferences. Keeping on top of emerging trends and sharing knowledge both inside and outside the organization.
• Education: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (Master’s or Ph.D. a plus), with strong foundations in algorithms and data structures.

Company Profile:

Zeta Global is a NYSE listed data-powered marketing technology company with a heritage of innovation and industry leadership. Founded in 2007 by entrepreneur David A. Steinberg and John Sculley, former CEO of Apple Inc and Pepsi-Cola, the Company combines the industry’s 3rd largest proprietary data set (2.4B+ identities) with Artificial Intelligence to unlock consumer intent, personalize experiences and help our clients drive business growth.

Our technology runs on the Zeta Marketing Platform, which powers ‘end to end’ marketing programs for some of the world’s leading brands. With expertise encompassing all digital marketing channels – Email, Display, Social, Search and Mobile – Zeta orchestrates acquisition and engagement programs that deliver results that are scalable, repeatable and sustainable.

Zeta Global is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, gender, ancestry, color, religion, sex, age, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, medical condition, disability, veterans status, or any other basis protected by law.

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