Senior Software Engineer, Streaming

Attentive; Wilmington (DE); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health & wellness benefits

Equity

Job summary

Attentive is searching for a Senior Software Engineer to join the Streaming team, responsible for designing and evolving the event streaming architecture for their messaging platform. Ideal candidates should have over 5 years of experience with high-throughput systems and proficiency in Java and distributed frameworks like Kafka.

The role involves substantial collaboration across teams to implement new capabilities, ensuring robust event delivery and system integration. Attentive offers a competitive salary range of $150,000-$210,000 annually, along with equity and other benefits.

Qualifications

• 5+ years experience architecting and supporting high-throughput, distributed systems.
• Deep understanding of distributed streaming frameworks.
• Proficient in Java (Spring Boot) and modern development practices.
• Able to debug issues across the stack and communicate clearly.
• Experience with observability and developer tooling for streaming.

Responsibilities

• Architect and evolve next-generation event streaming platform.
• Enhance self-service for product engineering and data teams.
• Simplify and modernize streaming architecture.
• Solve complex distributed systems challenges.
• Champion best practices and technology selection.

Skills

Event streaming systems

Java (Spring Boot)

Kafka

Distributed systems

Kubernetes (EKS)

Terraform

Tools

AWS

Postgres

React

Python

Job description

About the Role

We’re looking for a highly driven Senior Software Engineer to join our Streaming team, which powers the backbone of Attentive’s messaging and personalization platform. Our event streaming systems handle over 2 million messages per second and sit at the heart of how product and data engineering teams build real-time, customer-facing experiences.

In this role, you’ll help shape the future of our streaming architecture, moving us to modern platforms, and unlocking new capabilities for debugging, load testing, and observability. Your work won’t just keep the pipes flowing it will directly influence how quickly we can experiment, personalize, and scale across millions of devices and billions of events.

What You’ll Accomplish

• Architect and evolve Attentive’s next-generation event streaming platform: Design high-throughput, low-latency solutions that power mission-critical messaging, personalization, and data integration use cases across Attentive’s ecosystem
• Enhance self-service for product engineering and data teams: Build and refine self-serve tools for event observability, debugging, load testing, and system configuration, empowering teams to experiment and ship quickly
• Simplify and modernize streaming architecture: Remove unnecessary abstraction layers, enable direct access for power users, and ensure the platform is flexible for both “paved path” and advanced use cases
• Solve complex distributed systems challenges: Improve event delivery reliability, cost efficiency, and system integration for real-time and batch workloads
• Champion best practices and technology selection: Stay ahead of industry advancements in event streaming, advocating for tools and approaches that balance innovation with long-term reliability
• Collaborate across engineering: Partner with product, data, and infrastructure teams to launch new customer-facing features, integrations, and scalable solutions built on streaming infrastructure

Your Expertise

• 5+ years experience architecting and supporting high-throughput, distributed systems at scale—especially those involving event streaming or messaging platforms
• Deep understanding of the internals of distributed streaming frameworks such as Kafka, Flink, Pulsar, and/or Spark
• Proficient in Java (Spring Boot) and familiar with modern development practices, including object-oriented design, data structures, and algorithms
• Able to debug issues across the stack—from message serialization and event schemas to network and JVM tuning—and communicate tradeoffs clearly
• Familiar with resource scheduling, data locality, and how infrastructure choices impact cost and system behavior
• Experience with observability and developer tooling for streaming (e.g., tracing, metrics, replay). Infrastructure-as-code expertise (Terraform, Helm), comfortable with Kubernetes (EKS) and cloud-native environments
• Track record of modernizing platforms: sunsetting legacy systems, moving to managed services, or implementing self-service capabilities
• Excited by new technologies, but pragmatic about introducing them—focused on solving real business problems

What We Use

• Our infrastructure runs primarily in Kubernetes hosted in AWS’s EKS
• Infrastructure tooling includes Istio, Datadog, Terraform, CloudFlare, and Helm
• Our backend is Java / Spring Boot microservices, built with Gradle, coupled with things like DynamoDB, AirFlow, Postgres, and Redis, hosted via AWS
• Our frontend is built with React and TypeScript, and uses best practices like GraphQL, Storybook, Radix UI, Vite, esbuild, and Playwright
• Our automation is driven by custom and open source machine learning models, lots of data and built with Python, Metaflow, HuggingFace , PyTorch, TensorFlow, and Pandas

For US Based Applicants

• The US base salary range for this full-time position is $150,000-$210,000 annually + equity + benefits
• Our salary ranges are determined by role, level and location

You’ll get competitive perks and benefits, from health & wellness to equity, to help you bring your best self to work.

At Attentive, we know that our Company's strength lies in the diversity of our employees. Attentive is an Equal Opportunity Employer and we welcome applicants from all backgrounds. Our policy is to provide equal employment opportunities for all employees, applicants and covered individuals regardless of protected characteristics. We prioritize and maintain a fair, inclusive and equitable workplace free from discrimination, harassment, and retaliation. Attentive is also committed to providing reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities. If you need any assistance or reasonable accommodations, please let your recruiter know.

By applying for this position, your data will be processed as per Attentive's Privacy Policy.