Zeta Global is looking to solve the problem of efficiently acquiring, growing, and retaining customers for marketers by leveraging AI and a vast amount of consumer data. The Staff Backend Engineer will be responsible for designing, building, and optimizing the backend systems that power their low-latency ad platform, ensuring it can handle high-throughput workloads with minimal latency and maximum 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.
- Experience with both SQL and NoSQL databases for high-volume applications.
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.
- 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).
- 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.
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.
- 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.
- Excellent problem-solving and communication skills.
- Proven collaboration skills in an agile development environment.
