Lead Software Engineer – Real-Time Events

zetaglobal; United States; Remote; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible PTO

Medical, dental, and vision coverage

Employee equity

Wellness classes

Discounts

Pet insurance

Job summary

zetaglobal in the United States is seeking a senior software engineering leader to own architecture and production delivery for a real-time event pipeline. You will mentor engineers, drive latency, throughput, and data quality targets, and partner with product and data teams to translate requirements into reliable high-volume data ingestion and processing services.

The role emphasizes on-call ownership and architectural excellence.

Qualifications

• Eight to ten years of software engineering experience including lead or staff-level work on event/data infrastructure.
• Production experience with event streaming such as Kafka, Python services and APIs, and pipeline processing tools such as Spark or EMR.
• Ability to design, deploy, and operate systems on AWS (S3, SQS/SNS, Lambda, RDS).
• Fluency in Python or substantial experience with Scala and Java, plus familiarity with databases such as Postgres/MySQL/Redis/DynamoDB.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and launch event pipeline features, owning architecture for the areas you lead.
• Assess technologies for improvements in latency, cost, or operability and implement in production.
• Define stable interfaces with downstream data consumers and collaborate on architecture and pipelines.
• Mentor engineers through design reviews and implementation patterns.
• Collaborate with product, data, and consumer teams to meet latency and throughput targets.
• Improve instrumentation, alerting, on-call readiness, and runbooks.

Skills

Leadership

Event streaming

Kafka

Python

Scala/Java

AWS

Data stores

System design

Monitoring

Tools

Kafka

Spark

EMR

Airflow

S3

Lambda

RDS

PostgreSQL

Job description

Role overview

Lead hands-on engineering for a real-time event pipeline that ingests, processes, and delivers high volumes of data to downstream products. You will own architecture and production delivery for key parts of the system, translating performance and correctness expectations into reliable services. The role also includes technical mentorship and operational ownership.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and launch event pipeline features, owning architecture for the areas you lead.
• Assess technologies for clear improvements in cost, latency, or operational efficiency, then implement suitable choices in production.
• Define stable interfaces with downstream data consumers and collaborate on architecture and pipeline projects.
• Mentor engineers through design and code reviews, pairing, and clear implementation patterns.
• Work with product, data, and consumer teams to turn latency, throughput, and correctness targets into system behavior.
• Improve instrumentation and alerting, participate in on-call, and address incidents through root-cause fixes, runbooks, and dashboards.

Requirements

• Eight to ten years of software engineering experience, including lead or staff-level work on event, streaming, or data infrastructure.
• Production experience with event streaming such as Kafka, Python services and APIs, and pipeline processing tools such as Spark or EMR as needed.
• Ability to design, deploy, and operate systems on AWS, including services such as S3, SQS/SNS, Lambda, and RDS.
• Fluency in Python or substantial experience with Scala and Java, plus familiarity with databases and stores such as Postgres, MySQL, Redis, or DynamoDB.
• Experience across the software lifecycle, including production monitoring and on-call, with a record of managing throughput, reliability, cost, data quality, and service objectives.
• Strong communication skills for explaining design choices and trade-offs to partner teams.

Nice to have

• Experience with workflow orchestration tools such as Apache Airflow.

Benefits and work setup

Listed benefits include flexible paid time off, medical, dental, and vision coverage, employee equity, wellness classes, discounts, and pet insurance.