WHO WE ARE

Zeta Global (NYSE: ZETA) is the AI-Powered Marketing Cloud that leverages advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and trillions of consumer signals to make it easier for marketers to acquire, grow, and retain customers more efficiently. Through the Zeta Marketing Platform (ZMP), our vision is to make sophisticated marketing simple by unifying identity, intelligence, and omnichannel activation into a single platform – powered by one of the industry’s largest proprietary databases and AI. Our enterprise customers across multiple verticals are empowered to personalize experiences with consumers at an individual level across every channel, delivering better results for marketing programs. Zeta was founded in 2007 by David A. Steinberg and John Sculley and is headquartered in New York City with offices around the world. To learn more, go to www.zetaglobal.com.

Position Overview

Zeta Global is seeking a Lead Software Engineer to join the Opportunity Insights team. This role is for a highly experienced engineer who operates at system and platform scope — someone who can define architecture, drive technical direction, and deliver scalable, data-intensive systems that power marketing intelligence products.

You will lead the design and evolution of distributed systems running on AWS and Kubernetes (EKS), enabling large-scale data processing and real-time insights across billions of data points. This role requires deep expertise in distributed systems, strong architectural judgment, and the ability to influence engineering standards across teams.

What You’ll Do

Define and evolve the architecture of scalable, distributed systems deployed on AWS.

Design and operate microservices and data-intensive workloads running in Kubernetes (EKS).

Lead technical design for systems that process and analyze large-scale datasets (high-volume, high-velocity, and high-variety data).

Establish patterns and best practices for building resilient, observable, and performant services.

Partner with Product, Data Science, and Engineering leaders to translate business strategy into long-term technical roadmaps.

Drive cross-team technical initiatives and influence architecture decisions beyond your immediate team.

Optimize data storage, retrieval, and processing strategies across relational and NoSQL systems.

Mentor engineers, raise the bar on design and code quality, and lead through technical example.

Take end-to-end ownership of critical platform components, ensuring long-term scalability and maintainability.

Requirements

8+ years of experience building and scaling production-grade distributed systems.

Strong foundation in computer science, distributed systems, and large-scale system design.

Proven experience architecting systems that operate on large datasets (event streams, batch + real-time pipelines, high-throughput services).

Deep hands-on experience with AWS, including EKS, EC2, S3, RDS, IAM, Lambda, CloudWatch, and infrastructure-as-code practices.

Strong expertise in Kubernetes (EKS) and containerized microservices architectures.

Experience with streaming and data infrastructure technologies such as Kafka, Elasticsearch, and NoSQL databases (e.g., Aerospike).

Strong proficiency in Java, Python, Ruby, or similar object-oriented languages.

Experience designing APIs and service communication layers (REST, gRPC, Thrift).

Demonstrated ability to lead technical design reviews and influence engineering direction.

Excellent problem-solving skills and ability to operate independently in a fast-paced environment.

Experience leveraging AI-powered development tools to improve engineering productivity.

Preferred Qualifications

BS or MS in Computer Science or related field.

Experience building platforms that support ML or advanced analytics workloads.

Experience modernizing or evolving legacy systems into scalable cloud-native architectures.

Track record of leading high-impact, cross-team engineering initiatives.

BENEFITS & PERKS

Unlimited PTO
Excellent medical, dental, and vision coverage
Employee Equity
Employee Discounts, Virtual Wellness Classes, and Pet Insurance And more!!

SALARY RANGE

The salary range for this role is $190,000 - $205,000, depending on location and experience.

PEOPLE & CULTURE AT ZETA

Zeta considers applicants for

Lead Software Engineer, Opportunity Insights at Zeta Global