Senior Real-Time Ad Server Engineer (Lua/C++) — Hybrid/Remote

zetaglobal; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 110,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Excellent medical, dental, and vision

Job summary

Zeta Global is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to design, implement, and own the real-time ad serving logic powering programmatic advertising at scale. You will predominantly work in Lua, with C++ on the server framework, optimizing ad selection, targeting, and delivery metrics.

This hands-on role runs in production with billions of daily transactions and requires strong backend expertise. You will collaborate with Product to ship features affecting advertisers and publishers, and you should

Qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering experience in backend development.
• Experience with Lua or willingness to learn (we provide time and the right environment).
• Experience in online advertising / ad tech (RTB, programmatic, DSP/SSP) is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Develop and optimize business logic in Lua for ad selection, targeting, frequency capping, and budget pacing.
• Design, build, and maintain real-time services processing 200K+ requests per second with strict latency requirements.
• Work closely with Product to deliver features that meet advertiser and publisher needs.
• Ensure code quality through code reviews, automated testing, and continuous integration.
• Participate in architecture discussions and influence the technical roadmap.
• Participate in on-call rotation to support production systems.

Skills

Lua

C++

Distributed systems

OpenRTB

AWS

Tools

MongoDB

OpenRTB protocol

AWS

Job description

Zeta Global is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to design, implement, and own the real-time ad serving logic powering programmatic advertising at scale. You will predominantly work in Lua, with C++ on the server framework, optimizing ad selection, targeting, and delivery metrics.

This hands-on role runs in production with billions of daily transactions and requires strong backend expertise. You will collaborate with Product to ship features affecting advertisers and publishers, and you should