Staff Software Engineer, Zeta Global
Forecasting
$200-230k
The AI marketing cloud
Be an early applicant
The AI marketing cloud
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$200-230k
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
- 10+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating production-grade distributed systems
- A strong track record of hands-on ownership of business-critical services, including measurable improvements in latency, throughput, stability, or cost
- Deep expertise in systems design, including service boundaries, concurrency, data modeling, failure handling, and scalability tradeoffs
- Production experience supporting machine learning–driven systems (forecasting, recommendations, or similar), with emphasis on serving, pipelines, and infrastructure
- Expert-level experience with AWS, including designing, deploying, and operating large-scale cloud-native systems
- Strong hands-on experience with Kubernetes, containerized microservices, and modern CI/CD pipelines
- Experience operating software in both on-prem data center and AWS cloud environments
- Fluency with modern AI-assisted development tools (e.g., Cursor, GitHub Copilot) and comfort working in “vibe coding”–style workflows that favor fast iteration, tight feedback loops, and continuous refactoring
- Proficiency in one or more backend languages commonly used for large-scale systems (e.g., Python, Java, Go, Scala)
- Bachelor’s or master’s degree in computer science, Mathematics, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
What the job involves
- We are hiring a hands-on Staff Software Engineer to provide technical leadership for our Forecasting and Recommendations platforms, with a strong focus on production-grade AI and agentic systems
- This role centers on designing, building, and operating high-throughput, low-latency distributed systems that power forecasting, recommendations, and AI-driven decisioning at scale
- You will work deeply in backend systems, infrastructure, and AI application architecture, while remaining accountable for reliability, observability, and operational excellence
- We are looking for an engineer who can contribute immediately, has shouldered real production incidents, and brings strong judgment around building stable, observable, and scalable systems, including modern agentic and LLM-powered applications
- Design, build, and operate systems supporting forecasting, recommendations, and agentic AI workflows in production
- Write production-quality code daily; own services end-to-end from design through on-call and incident resolution
- Architect low-latency, high-throughput SaaS services, including APIs, data pipelines, model inference, and agent orchestration
- Build and maintain production-grade agentic applications, including tool-using agents, workflow orchestration, and guardrails
- Work fluently with foundational LLMs (e.g., GPT, Claude, Gemini Pro), selecting appropriate models and deployment patterns based on latency, cost, and reliability tradeoffs
- Use frameworks and tooling such as LangChain, voice agents, and related ecosystems to accelerate development—while enforcing production discipline
- Embrace AI-assisted development workflows (e.g., Cursor, GitHub Copilot, vibe coding paradigms) to move quickly without sacrificing quality
- Champion observability and reliability: metrics, logging, tracing, alerting, and post-incident analysis
- Lead and participate in production incident response, retrospectives, and systemic fixes
- Identify architectural risks early and make design decisions that prevent outages and scalability issues
- Reduce complexity across services, infrastructure, and processes to improve stability and team velocity
- Provide technical guidance across teams and participate in architectural reviews beyond your immediate domain
- In this role, you are expected to:
- Be a prolific, hands-on contributor who raises the bar through example
- Own and deeply understand large portions of the codebase and system architecture
- Simplify complex systems to increase team velocity and reliability
- Balance technical, analytical, and product constraints to deliver pragmatic solutions
- Set short- to medium-term (6–12 month) technical direction for your domain
- Influence standards and architectural decisions across teams through credibility and collaboration
- Ship multiple large services, shared libraries, or major infrastructure improvements
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.
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