Zeta Global seeks a Lead Software Engineer for the Real-Time Events team to design, build, and operate the real-time event pipeline powering the Zeta Marketing Platform. Responsibilities include technical leadership, architecture ownership, evaluating and deploying new technologies, mentoring team members, collaborating with product and data teams, and ensuring infrastructure reliability and monitoring. Candidates must have 8-10 years of software engineering experience with event streaming systems, proficiency in Kafka, Python (FastAPI), Spark/EMR, AWS services (S3, SQS/SNS, Lambda, RDS), and experience with databases like Postgres, MySQL, Redis, or DynamoDB. Experience with Apache Airflow and managing production high-throughput pipelines is required. Strong communication skills are essential. Benefits include unlimited PTO, medical/dental/vision coverage, employee equity, discounts, wellness classes, and pet insurance. Salary range is $200,000 - $210,000 depending on location and experience.
What you'll do
Design, implement, and launch event-pipeline features in production
Own architecture for the parts of the pipeline you lead
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Bellevue, United States; Boston, United States; Boulder, United States; Chicago, United States; Denver, United States; Los Angeles, United States; New York, US; San Francisco, United States; San Jose, United States; Seattle, United States; Ventura, United States•13 days ago
Evaluate existing or emerging technologies for cost, latency, or operational advantage and deploy them in production
Engage in architectural discussions, take ownership of key pipeline projects, and define stable contracts with downstream consumers
Mentor teammates through design reviews, code reviews, and pairing
Help teammates ship via clear interfaces, solid tests, and production-ready patterns
Partner with Product, Data, and ZMP consumer teams to turn SLAs (latency, throughput, correctness) into working systems
Instrument services, improve alerting, and own on-call gaps
Drive post-incident fixes including root cause analysis, code fixes, runbooks, and dashboards
Maintain pipeline predictability under load
Requirements
Minimum of 8–10 years in software engineering, including Lead/Staff-level work on event, streaming, or data-infrastructure systems
Production experience with event streaming (Kafka or equivalent), Python services and APIs (e.g. FastAPI), and pipeline processing (Spark/EMR or equivalent)
Proficient in designing, deploying, and operating systems on AWS (S3, SQS/SNS, Lambda, RDS, and similar)
Experience with the complete software development lifecycle, from design through production, monitoring, and on-call
Fluency in Python or substantial experience in Scala and Java
Skilled with data stores used around event pipelines (e.g. Postgres/MySQL, Redis, DynamoDB or similar)
Experience with orchestrators such as Apache Airflow
Track record owning high-throughput pipelines in production: incidents, performance and cost, observability, data quality, and SLOs
Excellent interpersonal and communication abilities; can explain pipeline design and trade-offs to partners who consume ZMP event data
