Engineering Manager, Streaming

Attentive

About The Position

Attentive® is an AI marketing platform focused on 1:1 personalization, redefining how brands and people connect. It's a marketing platform that combines technology with human expertise to build authentic customer relationships, unifying SMS, RCS, email, and push notifications. Their AI-powered personalization engine delivers bespoke experiences that drive performance, revenue, and loyalty through real-time behavioral insights. Attentive is recognized as the #1 provider in SMS Marketing by G2, partnering with over 8,000 customers across 70+ industries, including leading global brands like Crate and Barrel, Urban Outfitters, and Carter’s. The company has a distributed global workforce with employee hubs in New York City, San Francisco, London, and Sydney, and has been recognized for its performance and culture, including Deloitte’s Fast 500, LinkedIn’s Top Startups, Forbes’ Cloud 100, Inc.’s Best Workplaces, and the Human Rights Campaign Foundation's Corporate Equality Index. Attentive’s streaming platform is the core of its real-time messaging and personalization ecosystem, handling billions of events and millions of messages per second, enabling teams to build responsive, data-driven products at massive scale. This role is for an Engineering Manager to lead the Streaming Platform team, responsible for evolving and operating the core infrastructure for event ingestion, processing, and delivery. The manager will provide strong technical leadership and people management to advance the streaming architecture, balancing reliability, scalability, and developer productivity. This position involves working at the intersection of infrastructure, data, and product engineering, collaborating with various teams to drive innovation in personalization, experimentation, and growth. It is a high-impact role for a leader passionate about scaling distributed systems and building high-performing teams in a dynamic environment.

Requirements

9+ years of experience in software engineering, with 2+ years in engineering management or technical leadership roles.
Strong background in distributed systems and high-throughput data infrastructure, particularly event streaming or messaging systems.
Experience with technologies such as Kafka, Pulsar, Flink, Spark, or Kinesis, and a deep understanding of their tradeoffs and operating models.
Proven ability to lead complex platform or infrastructure initiatives spanning multiple teams.
Solid backend engineering skills (preferably Java/Spring Boot) with the ability to engage in technical design and code reviews.
Experience building and operating systems with a focus on scalability, reliability, and debuggability.
Familiarity with cloud-native infrastructure (AWS, Kubernetes/EKS) and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Helm).
Strong understanding of observability practices (metrics, tracing, logging) in distributed systems.
Demonstrated ability to hire, mentor, and grow engineers, and foster an inclusive, high-performance culture.
Excellent communication skills, with the ability to clearly articulate technical tradeoffs and influence stakeholders.

Responsibilities

Define and drive the technical vision and roadmap for Attentive’s streaming platform (Kafka, Pulsar, Flink, etc.), aligning with company-wide goals.
Evolve the streaming platform to support AI/agent-driven workloads, including real-time feature pipelines, low-latency inference, event replay, and closed-loop feedback systems for continuous learning and decisioning.
Partner with ML and data teams to define standards and primitives (data contracts, observability, consistency) that enable reliable integration between streaming systems and AI agents while maintaining scalability, debuggability, and platform simplicity.
Oversee the design and evolution of high-throughput, low-latency, and cost-efficient streaming systems that power mission-critical use cases.
Build, mentor, and lead a high-performing team of engineers, fostering a culture of ownership, collaboration, and continuous improvement.
Balance hands-on technical involvement with people leadership, providing guidance on architecture, design, and execution.
Drive effective planning, prioritization, and delivery across multiple initiatives while maintaining high standards for quality and reliability.
Champion improvements to the streaming developer experience, including tooling for observability, debugging, testing, and configuration.
Enable product and data teams to move faster by building self-service capabilities and paved paths, while supporting advanced use cases for power users.
Promote best practices in event design, schema management, and system usage across the organization.
Partner with product, data, infrastructure, and ML teams to deliver scalable, real-time solutions for customer-facing features.
Act as a bridge between platform and application teams, ensuring alignment on priorities, tradeoffs, and system capabilities.
Influence broader engineering strategy around real-time systems, data infrastructure, and platform architecture.
Ensure high standards for reliability, observability, and incident response across the streaming ecosystem.
Drive improvements in system performance, cost efficiency, and scalability.
Establish and maintain best practices for monitoring, alerting, and debugging distributed systems at scale.