Staff Software Engineer, Data Systems & Personalization

Attentive; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 230,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Health benefits

Wellness programs

Job summary

Attentive, the AI marketing platform for personalized customer experiences, is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead high‑scale user-profile data systems. You will own architecture for data ingestion, processing, and serving at scale, and provide technical leadership across multiple teams.

You’ll mentor engineers, drive foundational platform capabilities, and partner with product, data, and ML teams to advance segmentation, personalization, and revenue attribution while delivering reliable,

Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with significant experience designing and operating backend or distributed systems at scale.
• Technical leadership on complex, multi‑team initiatives, taking ambiguous problems from definition through architecture, execution, and successful operation in production.
• Deep experience with high‑scale data ingestion, processing, and streaming architectures, including systems handling large volumes of user, event, or similarly high‑cardinality data.
• Strong programming and software‑design skills in Java or similar backend languages, combined with strong distributed‑systems fundamentals across scalability, reliability, performance, and observability.
• Demonstrated ability to make and communicate high‑impact architectural decisions, identify systemic technical risks and opportunities, and balance immediate product needs with long‑term platform health.
• Strong communication, influence, and mentorship skills, with a track record of aligning teams around technical strategy and raising the engineering bar without relying on formal authority.

Responsibilities

• Set technical direction and architecture for high‑scale systems and APIs responsible for the ingestion, processing, storage, and serving of user profiles and attributes.
• Lead complex, cross‑team engineering initiatives across APIs, streaming infrastructure, data processing, and integrations, translating ambiguous product and business needs into scalable technical solutions.
• Design and evolve foundational platform capabilities that enable teams across the company to safely and efficiently build on user‑profile data, including subscription lifecycle management and new data‑source integrations.
• Drive architectural investments that improve the scalability, reliability, data quality, observability, performance, and maintainability of systems processing data at massive scale.
• Partner with product, data, and ML teams to shape how user attributes and large‑scale data processing capabilities support segmentation, personalization, revenue attribution, behavioral analytics, and machine learning.
• Multiply the effectiveness of other engineers through technical mentorship, design reviews, architectural guidance, and engineering standards while remaining hands‑on with foundational and technically challenging work.

Skills

8+ years experience

Distributed systems

Backend architecture

Java

Technical leadership

Mentorship

Job description

Attentive, the AI marketing platform for personalized customer experiences, is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead high‑scale user-profile data systems. You will own architecture for data ingestion, processing, and serving at scale, and provide technical leadership across multiple teams.

You’ll mentor engineers, drive foundational platform capabilities, and partner with product, data, and ML teams to advance segmentation, personalization, and revenue attribution while delivering reliable,