High-Volume Email Deliverability Engineer

Talently (United States); United States; Remote; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Talently is seeking an Email Infrastructure & Deliverability Engineer to design, build, and operate scalable email systems for high-volume sending. You will own end-to-end delivery pipelines, including observability, incident response, and IP/domain reputation management.

You will work in a small team, autonomously driving improvements in SMTP reliability, domain authentication, and deliverability metrics, leveraging Go/Node.js/TypeScript and modern tooling.

Qualifications

• Strong backend or infrastructure engineering experience.
• Production experience building or operating high-volume email systems, ideally at an ESP or marketing 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.

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.
• 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.

Skills

Backend engineering

High-volume email systems

SMTP & deliverability

Sender reputation management

DNS & DKIM/DMARC

Queues & distributed workers

Rate limiting & throttling

Go / Node.js / TypeScript

Tools

Klaviyo

Mailchimp

Braze

Iterable

SendGrid

Mailgun

Customer.io

Postfix

Haraka

PowerMTA

Go

Node.js

TypeScript

Kafka

Pub/Sub

Kubernetes

Prometheus

Job description

Talently is seeking an Email Infrastructure & Deliverability Engineer to design, build, and operate scalable email systems for high-volume sending. You will own end-to-end delivery pipelines, including observability, incident response, and IP/domain reputation management.

You will work in a small team, autonomously driving improvements in SMTP reliability, domain authentication, and deliverability metrics, leveraging Go/Node.js/TypeScript and modern tooling.