Email Infrastructure & Deliverability Engineer

Talently (United States); Nuevo (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Talently is looking for an Email Infrastructure & Deliverability Engineer to build and operate high-throughput email sending services, manage IP pools, and ensure deliverability. You will implement retry strategies, rate limits, warm-up plans, and domain onboarding for SPF/DKIM/DMARC.

You will own end-to-end systems, including observability, incident response, and SLA-driven reliability in a fast-growing startup environment.

Qualifications

• Strong backend or infrastructure engineering experience.
• Production experience building or operating high-volume email systems, ideally at an ESP or marketing automation platform.
• Deep knowledge of SMTP, bounces, complaints, deferrals, throttling, and mailbox-provider behavior.

Responsibilities

• Build and operate high-throughput email sending services, queues, and workers.
• Implement retries, backpressure, prioritization, rate limits, and adaptive throttling.
• Manage shared and dedicated IP pools, domain reputation, warm-up, and traffic routing.

Skills

Backend engineering

Infrastructure engineering

SMTP expertise

Email deliverability

Redis

SQL

Go

Node.js/TypeScript

Kubernetes

Observability

Incident response

Tools

Postfix

PowerMTA

Amazon SES

Job description

We’re an early-stage startup building next-generation personalization technology for digital marketing. Our mission is to help brands deliver smarter, more relevant customer experiences using data and machine learning.

As an Email Infrastructure & Deliverability Engineer, the company expects you to perform the following tasks

• Build and operate high-throughput email sending services, queues, and workers.
• Implement retries, backpressure, prioritization, rate limits, and adaptive throttling.
• Manage shared and dedicated IP pools, domain reputation, warm-up, and traffic routing.
• Build domain onboarding for SPF, DKIM, DMARC, return-path, and tracking domains.
• Process bounces, complaints, unsubscribes, suppressions, and ISP feedback loops.
• Monitor throughput, queue latency, deferrals, bounce rates, complaints, and reputation signals.
• Create automated guardrails that throttle, pause, reroute, or block unsafe sending.
• Diagnose production issues across SMTP, DNS, providers, queues, and mailbox providers.
• Own your systems end to end, including observability and incident response.

You are the person they are looking for if you have...

• Strong backend or infrastructure engineering experience.
• Production experience building or operating high-volume email systems, ideally at an ESP or marketing automation platform.
• Deep knowledge of SMTP, bounces, complaints, deferrals, throttling, and mailbox-provider behavior.
• Hands‑on experience managing sender reputation across domains and IP pools.
• Strong knowledge of SPF, DKIM, DMARC, DNS, domain alignment, and custom sending domains.
• Experience with queues, distributed workers, idempotency, rate limiting, SQL, and Redis.
• Ability to diagnose blocklists, spam complaints, authentication failures, and reputation changes.
• Understanding of how list quality, engagement, spam traps, and customer abuse affect deliverability.
• Clear communication and the ability to work autonomously in a small team.

They will be even more excited if you...

• Have experience at an ESP such as Klaviyo, Mailchimp, Braze, Iterable, SendGrid, Mailgun, or Customer.io.
• Have experience with Amazon SES or MTAs such as Postfix, Haraka, or PowerMTA.
• Are familiar with Google Postmaster Tools, Microsoft SNDS/JMRP, feedback loops, and blocklist monitoring.
• Have experience with Go, Node.js/TypeScript, Kafka, Pub/Sub, Kubernetes, or Prometheus.
• Have experience using AI coding tools such as Claude Code or Codex.