Staff Software Engineer (m/f/d)

retailmediatools - a ZetaDisplay Company; Deutschland; Remote; EUR 120,000 - 170,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote-first

Flexible hours

Competitive compensation

Job summary

Retail Media team at retailmediatools, a ZetaDisplay Company, is building a real-time ad-serving platform used by enterprise retailers. You will own core parts of the data pipeline and backend services that filter, rank and serve ads across multiple regions in the EU and US.

We value autonomy, senior engineers who own end-to-end work, and a lean, fast-moving team. Go is our main backend language and you’ll work across infrastructure and data layers.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in software engineering, with 3+ years in data-intensive or latency-sensitive production systems in ad-tech or similar.
• Strong, current experience with Go in production; or deep experience in Java, Rust, or C++ and willingness to write Go daily.
• Solid SQL and data modeling; hands-on with a columnar warehouse (BigQuery ideally) and event streaming (Pub/Sub, Kafka).
• Real performance instincts: you think in p99s, and you've tuned Postgres queries, Redis usage, connections and gRPC under load.
• Hands-on with Kubernetes, Terraform and GitOps (Flux); you’ve debugged production resource, networking and rollout issues yourself.
• Comfort working in a lean, senior team — you’ll get autonomy fast, so experience owning systems matters.
• Startup or scale-up experience — building things from a smaller, less-defined base — strongly preferred.

Responsibilities

• Own significant parts of our ad-serving and event-tracking path end-to-end — from design through production, including a share of the on-call rotation
• Ship changes that cross the stack in one go: a new targeting feature might touch a Go service, a dbt model, a Terraform module and a GitOps manifest, and you'll own all four
• Keep the hot path fast and resilient — profile, cache, take hard dependencies off the request path, and catch latency and throughput regressions before our retailers do
• Keep the data correct and affordable: consistent event schemas and IDs between services and the warehouse, idempotent pipelines, clean backfills when something breaks, and BigQuery spend under control
• Raise the bar on reliability: SLOs, alerting, load testing, incident follow-ups, and CI pipelines fast enough that people don't route around them
• Help shape platform architecture decisions — multi-region rollout, storage choices, streaming vs batch — not just execute them
• Be comfortable using modern AI-assisted engineering tools to move faster, and pushing past your core competencies when the team needs it

Skills

Go in production

SQL and data modeling

Performance tuning

Latency-sensitive systems

End-to-end ownership

Tools

Terraform

Kubernetes

Flux (GitOps)

BigQuery

Pub/Sub

PostgreSQL

Redis

Job description

Retail Media is no longer the "next big thing" — it's one of the fastest-growing, most competitive segments in digital advertising, and retailers are under real pressure to run it well.

At retailmediatools, we build retail media infrastructure that lets big retailers plan, launch, and optimize retail media at scale. Every time a shopper opens a search page, a category page or an in-store screen, our Ad Service has a few milliseconds to filter, rank and return the right sponsored ads. Every impression, click, add-to-cart and order that follows flows back through our event pipeline into the attribution and reporting that advertisers pay on.

We're a small, senior team of engineers and retail experts who ship fast and own what we build. Since joining ZetaDisplay Group, we've got the backing of a larger group behind us — without losing the lean, pragmatic way we've always worked.

We're looking for an engineer who doesn't stop at a team boundary: someone equally at home in a Go service on the hot path, a dbt model in the warehouse and a Terraform plan for the cluster underneath both. If that sounds like you, read on.

What you'll work on

You’ll work across three layers of one platform, not one team's slice of it. Go is our main backend language.

• Ad serving. The Go services behind our Ad Serving API: real-time filtering on keywords, categories, SKUs, stores and audiences, ranking on bid and relevance, budgets and serving status — running in multiple regions across the EU and US for enterprise retailers.
• Events, attribution and data products. High-volume tracking events streamed into BigQuery, dbt models that turn them into post-click, post-view and last-touch attribution, reporting, forecasting, bid suggestions and raw data exports — all with EU data residency and pseudonymized identifiers.
• Platform. GCP and Kubernetes, deployed with Flux (GitOps) and provisioned with Terraform, plus Postgres, Redis, Pub/Sub, Argo Workflows and the observability (Grafana, Sentry) that keeps it honest.

Responsibilities

• Own significant parts of our ad-serving and event-tracking path end-to-end — from design through production, including a share of the on-call rotation
• Ship changes that cross the stack in one go: a new targeting feature might touch a Go service, a dbt model, a Terraform module and a GitOps manifest, and you'll own all four
• Keep the hot path fast and resilient — profile, cache, take hard dependencies off the request path, and catch latency and throughput regressions before our retailers do
• Keep the data correct and affordable: consistent event schemas and IDs between services and the warehouse, idempotent pipelines, clean backfills when something breaks, and BigQuery spend under control
• Raise the bar on reliability: SLOs, alerting, load testing, incident follow-ups, and CI pipelines fast enough that people don't route around them
• Help shape platform architecture decisions — multi-region rollout, storage choices, streaming vs. batch — not just execute them
• Be comfortable using modern AI-assisted engineering tools to move faster, and pushing past your core competencies when the team needs it

Qualifications

• 8+ years in software engineering, with 3+ years building data-intensive or latency-sensitive systems in production — ad-tech, real-time bidding, search, recommendations, payments, trading or similar
• Strong, current experience with Go in production, or deep experience in another systems language (Java, Rust, C++) and a willingness to write Go every day
• Solid SQL and data modeling; hands‑on with a columnar warehouse (BigQuery ideally) and event streaming (Pub/Sub, Kafka or similar)
• Real performance instincts: you think in p99s, and you've tuned Postgres queries, Redis usage, connection pools and gRPC under load
• Hands‑on with Kubernetes, Terraform and GitOps (we use Flux) — you've debugged production resource, networking and rollout issues yourself, not just filed a ticket
• Comfort working in a lean, senior team — you'll get autonomy fast, so experience owning systems (not just tickets) matters
• Startup or scale‑up experience — building things from a smaller, less-defined base — strongly preferred

Nice to have

• Ad-tech domain knowledge: auctions and ranking, budget pacing, attribution models, IAB measurement standards, VAST
• dbt and analytics engineering; GCP specifics like the BigQuery Storage Write API, Datastream and Cloud SQL
• Privacy-conscious data engineering: GDPR, pseudonymized identifiers, EU data residency
• Search and relevance: hybrid keyword and embedding search
• Experience integrating AI tooling into the engineering workflow
• Real ownership — small team, clear scope, no committee decisions
• Clear product focus, now with the resourcing of a larger group behind it
• Remote-first, flexible hours — we care about output
• Meetings only when they earn their place on your calendar
• Competitive compensation, benchmarked to reflect the seniority we're hiring for

Our Mission

We build the software that lets retailers create, manage, and run retail media that actually moves the needle for their brands.