Lead Software Engineer – Real-Time Events

Zeta Global

11d•$200,000 - $210,000

About The Position

Zeta Global is looking for a Lead Software Engineer to join the Real-Time Events (RTE) team. This is a highly hands-on individual contributor role. The engineer will be responsible for designing, building, and operating the ZMP real-time events pipeline, which involves ingesting, processing, and delivering high-volume event data that powers Zeta Marketing Platform products.

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) where needed.
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.

Responsibilities

Technical Leadership: Design, implement, and launch event-pipeline features in production. Own architecture for the parts of the pipeline you lead.
Thought Leadership & Innovation: Evaluate existing or emerging technologies where they offer a clear cost, latency, or operational advantage, and land those choices in production.
Engineering Collaboration: Engage in architectural discussions, take ownership of key pipeline projects, and define stable contracts with downstream consumers.
Team Mentorship: Mentor through design reviews, code reviews, and pairing. Help teammates ship via clear interfaces, solid tests, and production-ready patterns.
Product Collaboration: Partner with Product, Data, and ZMP consumer teams to turn SLAs (latency, throughput, correctness) into working systems.
Infrastructure & Reliability: Instrument services, improve alerting, and own on-call gaps yourself. Drive post-incident fixes (root cause, code, runbooks, dashboards) and keep the pipeline predictable under load.