Lead Software Engineer – Real-Time Events

Zeta Global; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 200,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Unlimited PTO

Premium medical/dental/vision coverage

Employee equity

Discounts, wellness programs, pet보험

Job summary

Zeta Global is seeking a Lead Software Engineer for Real-Time Events to design, build, and operate the high-volume RTE pipeline powering the ZMP. This hands-on IC role requires architectural ownership, mentoring, and close collaboration with Product, Data, and consumer teams.

You will implement production-ready features, improve latency, throughput, and reliability, and drive on-call incident response while shaping the future of Zeta’s real-time data platform.

Qualifications

• Minimum 8–10 years in software engineering, with lead/staff experience on data-infrastructure.
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Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and launch production-grade event-pipeline features.
• Maintain architecture ownership for pipeline components.
• Collaborate with Product/Data teams to meet SLAs for latency and throughput.
• Mentor team members through reviews and production-ready patterns.
• Drive reliability, observability, and post-incident fixes.

Skills

8–10 years experience

Event streaming (Kafka)

Python services

Scala & Java

Spark/EMR

AWS (S3, SQS/SNS, Lambda, RDS)

Airflow

Postgres/MySQL, Redis, DynamoDB

Tools

Kafka

FastAPI

Airflow

Spark/EMR

Job description

Lead Software Engineer – Real-Time Events

WHO WE ARE

Zeta Global (NYSE: ZETA) is the AI-Powered Marketing Cloud that leverages advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and trillions of consumer signals to make it easier for marketers to acquire, grow, and retain customers more efficiently. Through the Zeta Marketing Platform (ZMP), our vision is to make sophisticated marketing simple by unifying identity, intelligence, and omnichannel activation into a single platform – powered by one of the industry’s largest proprietary databases and AI. Our enterprise customers across multiple verticals are empowered to personalize experiences with consumers at an individual level across every channel, delivering better results for marketing programs. Zeta was founded in 2007 by David A. Steinberg and John Sculley and is headquartered in New York City with offices around the world. To learn more, go towww.zetaglobal.com .

Role Overview

Zeta Global is looking for a Lead Software Engineer to join Real-Time Events (RTE). This is a highly hands-on IC role. You will design, build, and operate the ZMP real-time events pipeline: ingesting, processing, and delivering high-volume event data that powers Zeta Marketing Platform products.

Key Responsibilities

• Technical Leadership: Design, implement, and launch event-pipeline features in production. Own architecture for the parts of the pipeline you lead.
• Thought Leadership & Innovation: Evaluate existing or emerging technologies where they offer a clear cost, latency, or operational advantage, and land those choices in production.
• Engineering Collaboration: Engage in architectural discussions, take ownership of key pipeline projects, and define stable contracts with downstream consumers.
• Team Mentorship: Mentor through design reviews, code reviews, and pairing. Help teammates ship via clear interfaces, solid tests, and production-ready patterns.
• Product Collaboration: Partner with Product, Data, and ZMP consumer teams to turn SLAs (latency, throughput, correctness) into working systems.
• Infrastructure & Reliability: Instrument services, improve alerting, and own on-call gaps yourself. Drive post-incident fixes (root cause, code, runbooks, dashboards) and keep the pipeline predictable under load.

Desired Qualifications and Expertise

• Extensive Experience: Minimum of 8–10 years in software engineering, including Lead/Staff-level work on event, streaming, or data-infrastructure systems.
• Technical Proficiency: Production experience with event streaming (Kafka or equivalent), Python services and APIs (e.g. FastAPI), and pipeline processing (Spark/EMR or equivalent) where needed.
• Cloud Expertise: Proficient in designing, deploying, and operating systems on AWS (S3, SQS/SNS, Lambda, RDS, and similar).
• Full Lifecycle Exposure: Experience with the complete software development lifecycle, from design through production, monitoring, and on-call.
• Programming Skills: Fluency in Python or substantial experience in Scala and Java.
• Database Proficiency: Skilled with data stores used around event pipelines (e.g. Postgres/MySQL, Redis, DynamoDB or similar).
• Scheduler Experience: Experience with orchestrators such as Apache Airflow.
• Operational Mindset: Track record owning high-throughput pipelines in production: incidents, performance and cost, observability, data quality, and SLOs.
• Communication Skills: Excellent interpersonal and communication abilities; can explain pipeline design and trade-offs to partners who consume ZMP event data.

BENEFITS & PERKS

• Unlimited PTO
• Excellent medical, dental, and vision coverage
• Employee Equity
• Employee Discounts, Virtual Wellness Classes, and Pet Insurance and more!!

SALARY RANGE

The salary range for this role is $200,000 - $210,000, depending on location and experience.

PEOPLE & CULTURE AT ZETA

Zeta considers applicants for employment without regard to, and does not discriminate on the basis of an individual’s sex, race, color, religion, age, disability, status as a veteran, or national or ethnic origin; nor does Zeta discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity or expression.

We’re committed to building a workplace culture of trust and belonging, so everyone feels invited to bring their whole selves to work. We provide a forum for employees to celebrate, support and advocate for one another. Learn more about our commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion here:https://zetaglobal.com/blog/a-look-into-zetas-ergs/

We are committed to building diverse teams with different identities, backgrounds and perspectives. We believe in providing a forum to connect at Zeta, to learn and celebrate differences. Our mission is to ensure we have an environment that enables a deep level of trust and belonging, so everyone feels invited to bring their whole selves to work, and to increase both diversity at Zeta as well as in the technology industry.