Zeta Global is looking to solve the problem of making marketing more efficient for their enterprise customers by leveraging AI and a vast amount of consumer data. The specific role aims to build and optimize the backend systems of their low-latency ad platform to handle high-throughput workloads with minimal latency, ensuring high performance and reliability.
Requirements
- 8+ years of software engineering experience building backend systems, with 3+ years in a senior or lead role (e.g. Staff Engineer, Principal Engineer) in the AdTech or a similar high-volume, low-latency domain.
- Proven track record in designing and building high-throughput, low-latency distributed systems that operate at scale (e.g. handling thousands of requests per second or more).
- Expertise in microservices architecture and distributed system design, including experience decomposing monoliths or building greenfield microservices with well-defined APIs.
- Proficiency in Java and Go for backend development, and experience with Python for scripting, automation, or data processing tasks.
- Hands-on experience with streaming data technologies and event-driven frameworks, such as Apache Kafka (or AWS Kinesis), and possibly stream processing frameworks (Spark Streaming, Flink, or similar, experience with Apache Kafka is highly desired).
- Strong experience with cloud platforms (AWS preferred) and deploying services in a cloud-native environment. Familiarity with AWS components like EC2, S3, Lambda, SNS/SQS, etc., and ability to design cost-effective, performant cloud architectures.
- Experience with both SQL and NoSQL databases for high-volume applications. Comfortable with technologies like PostgreSQL/MySQL as well as key-value or wide-column stores (e.g. DynamoDB, Cassandra, Redis) for caching and fast lookups.
Responsibilities
- Lead the design and implementation of scalable, high-performance backend services, including microservices and APIs, that can efficiently handle large volumes of requests with low latency. Ensure the architecture accommodates real-time bidding and personalization use cases common in AdTech.
- Develop and maintain streaming data pipelines and event-driven systems to process and analyze continuous data flows in real time (e.g., using Apache Kafka). Optimize data ingestion and processing for timeliness and accuracy to support downstream analytics and machine-learning models.
- Ensure the backend systems are highly performant, resilient, and stable under heavy load. Implement robust fault-tolerance mechanisms and optimize for low-latency response times in a high-concurrency environment.
- Leverage observability best practices (comprehensive monitoring, logging, and tracing) to enable engineers to quickly analyze system behavior and take proactive measures to boost performance and reliability.
- Work closely with cross-functional teams – including Product, Data Science, DevOps, and Frontend – to translate business requirements into scalable technical solutions.
- Provide technical leadership within the engineering team without direct managerial duties. Guide and mentor junior engineers through code reviews, design discussions, and best practice adoption, fostering a culture of technical excellence and continuous improvement.
- Stay abreast of emerging technologies and industry trends (e.g. new AWS services, streaming frameworks, database technologies) and evaluate their potential benefit to our platform.
Other
- This role is based in the United States and can be performed remotely, with a preference for candidates who can join us in a hybrid capacity in San Francisco, New York, or Atlanta.
- Excellent problem-solving and communication skills.
- Ability to communicate complex technical concepts clearly to cross-functional team members and stakeholders.
- Proven collaboration skills in an agile development environment.
- Domain Expertise: Deep knowledge of the programmatic advertising ecosystem, including how Demand-Side Platforms (DSPs), Supply-Side Platforms (SSPs), ad exchanges, and real-time bidding (RTB) work together. Prior experience building or optimizing components of a DSP or ad server is a strong plus.
