Senior DSP Engineer, Zeta Global
AdTech
The AI marketing cloud
Be an early applicant
The AI marketing cloud
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
1001+ employees
Company mission
To enable brands to build repeatable and scalable programs that accelerate business growth, efficiently, and effectively, and drive higher ROI on their marketing investments.
Role
Who you are
- This role is ideal for engineers who love distributed systems, performance engineering, and building production-grade systems at extreme scale
- 5+ years of software engineering (with substantial backend/distributed systems work). Staff: 8+ years with demonstrated ownership of large-scale, production systems
- Proven experience building low-latency, high-QPS services (real-time decisioning, trading, ad serving, marketplaces, or similar)
- Strong proficiency in Java and/or Go for performance-oriented backend development
- Solid understanding of distributed systems fundamentals: consistency trade-offs, caching, failure modes, retries/timeouts, backpressure, load shedding
- Experience operating production services on AWS and making practical cost/performance trade-offs
- Experience with data stores and patterns used in real-time systems (e.g., Redis/Memcached, DynamoDB/Cassandra, Kafka/Kinesis)
- Strong debugging skills across services: profiling, tracing, heap/GC analysis, latency investigations
- Clear communicator and collaborator; able to work effectively with engineering, product, and ML partners
- Able to explain complex systems to mixed audiences
- Hands-on DSP / RTB experience: OpenRTB, exchanges, SSP integrations, seats/accounts, bid request/response handling
- Experience with pacing/budgeting systems, bid shading, dynamic floors, and supply quality/brand-safety gating
- Experience integrating ML ranking/scoring in real time (feature retrieval, embeddings, model serving, inference optimization)
- Experience building privacy-aware systems (consent/identity signals, PII-safe logging, governance controls)
- Experience operating extremely high-scale systems (10^5–10^6+ QPS), multi-region design, or hybrid/colocation architectures
- Kubernetes/service mesh familiarity and/or deep Linux networking/performance knowledge (eBPF is a plus)
What the job involves
- We’re looking for a Senior / Staff DSP Engineer to build and evolve Zeta’s real-time bidding and decisioning systems
- This is a hands-on role focused on designing and operating low-latency, high-throughput services that process bid requests, score opportunities, apply pacing and budget constraints, and produce bids within strict SLAs
- You’ll work closely with platform, data, and ML teams to integrate retrieval and scoring systems into the bidder while keeping the hot path fast, safe, and observable
- Real-Time Bidding Systems: Design and build core DSP bidder components that handle high-QPS bid request ingestion, filtering, enrichment, decisioning, and bid response generation within strict time budgets
- Auction & Eligibility Logic: Implement auction logic, campaign/line-item eligibility, targeting constraints, frequency controls, supply quality checks, and policy enforcement
- Low-Latency Engineering: Optimize p99 latency and tail behavior using timeouts, backpressure, concurrency control, efficient serialization, caching strategies, and careful memory/GC management
- Pacing & Budgeting: Build and extend pacing and budget management logic (spend controls, throttling, goal-based pacing, safety constraints) and integrate with control-plane services (campaign config, feature flags, budgets)
- Scoring & ML Integration: Integrate real-time model scoring and feature retrieval systems with production guardrails (shadow mode, A/B tests, canaries, circuit breakers, fallbacks)
- Reliability & Operations: Define SLOs and observability (metrics, tracing, structured logging), participate in on-call, and drive post-incident improvements
- AWS at Scale: Build and operate services on AWS (compute, networking, autoscaling, streaming, data stores) and partner on cost/performance optimization
Our take
Zeta Global is a cloud-based AI marketing platform helping companies acquire, grow and retain customers more efficiently. Its flagship Zeta Marketing Platform (ZMP) combines identity resolution, consumer intelligence, and omnichannel activation into a single platform. Using one of the industry's largest proprietary database and advanced AI, Zeta makes personalized marketing simple for enterprise brands worldwide.
Its platform is particularly valuable in today's privacy-first, data-driven marketing environment. It helps brands understand individual customers and deliver relevant experience across every channel, from email and SMS ot digital and social. Serving top advertisers and Fortune 500 companies, Zeta turns complex data into actionable insights, so markets have a deeper relationship with their customers and drive measurable results in a competitive landscape.
Recently, Zeta expanded its capabilities with acquisition of Marigold's enterprise software business, adding over 100 enterprise clients and new loyalty and engagement tools. This strenghten's Zeta's "One Zeta" model, creates cross-selling opportunities, and extends its footpirnt in EMEA and APAC. Also backed by strong AI investments, a massive proprietary identity graph, and consistent revenue growth, Zeta is in a good position to help brands deliver smarter, more personalized marketing at scale for years to come.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
11% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 3 rounds)
Apr 2017
$115m
SERIES F
Jul 2015
$125m
LATE VC
Total funding: $310m
Company HQ
Midtown South, New York, NY
Leadership
David A Steinberg
(Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman of the Board)Prior to founding Zeta and CAIVIS, they founded InPhonic, the largest seller of wireless phones and communications products and services on the Internet. InPhonic was #1 on Inc. 500 list of fastest growing companies in 2004
John Sculley
(Co-Founder, Vice Chairman of ther Board & Investor)Former CEO of Apple Computer. They joined Apple in 1983 when the Company had $600 million in revenues; by the time they left, Apple's revenues exceeded $8 billion.
Salary benchmarks
We don't have enough data yet to provide salary benchmarks for this role.
Submit your salary to help other candidates with crowdsourced salary estimates.
Share this job
View 53 more jobs at Zeta Global