Senior Software Engineer – Forecasting & Recommendations
About the role:
We are hiring a hands-on Senior Software Engineer to build and operate backend services for our Forecasting and Recommendations platforms, with a focus on production-grade AI and data-driven decisioning systems.
This role focus on designing, building, and maintaining high-throughput, low-latency distributed systems that power forecasting, recommendations, and Performance Advisor capabilities at scale. You will work deeply in backend systems, APIs, event-driven services, and cloud infrastructure, while contributing to reliability, observability, and operational excellence.
We are looking for an engineer who can contribute immediately, has strong experience building scalable production systems, and brings sound judgment around developing reliable, maintainable, and high-performance software, including systems that integrate machine-learning and AI capabilities
What You’ll Do :
- Design, build, and operate backend services supporting forecasting, recommendations, and Performance Advisor workflows in production.
- Write production-quality code daily; own significant services and components from design through deployment, support, and incident resolution.
- Build low-latency, high-throughput SaaS services, including APIs, event-driven pipelines, data-processing services, and model-integration workflows.
- Develop and maintain scalable backend components that support AI- and machine-learning-driven product capabilities.
- Collaborate with data science, platform, and product teams to integrate forecasting, recommendation, and AI decisioning capabilities into production systems.
- Work with technologies such as Kafka, Elasticsearch, NoSQL databases, and AWS to build resilient distributed systems.
- Ensure product quality through rigorous code reviews, unit tests, debugging, and continuous improvement.
- Champion observability and reliability through metrics, logging, tracing, alerting, and root-cause analysis.
- Participate in production incident response, retrospectives, and systemic fixes.
- Identify performance, scalability, and reliability risks early and contribute practical solutions.
- Reduce complexity across services, infrastructure, and processes to improve stability and team velocity.
- Collaborate effectively across engineering and product teams in a large, distributed development.
What We’re Looking For :
- 8–12 years of professional software engineering experience building and operating scalable, robust backend systems.
- A strong track record of hands-on ownership of production services, including improvements in performance, reliability, scalability, or cost.
- Strong expertise in distributed systems design, including service boundaries, concurrency, data modeling, failure handling, and scalability tradeoffs.
- Experience developing high-throughput, event-driven systems and backend APIs.
- Experience supporting machine-learning-driven systems, forecasting, recommendations, or similar datadriven applications is strongly preferred.
- Strong hands-on experience with AWS and cloud-native system design and operations.
- Experience with Kafka, Elasticsearch, NoSQL databases such as Aerospike, Thrift, and modern CI/CD pipelines.
- Experience with container-based solutions and microservices architectures.
- Proficiency in one or more backend languages commonly used for large-scale systems, such as Python, Java, Ruby, Go, or Scala.
- Familiarity with modern AI-enabled applications, LLM integrations, or agentic workflows is a plus.
- Strong object-oriented programming, system design, problem-solving, critical-thinking, and communication skills.
- Bachelor’s or master’s degree in computer science, Mathematics, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
Senior-Level Expectations
In this role, you are expected to:
- Be a strong, hands-on contributor who delivers high-quality software and sets a strong engineering example.
- Take ownership of significant services, components, or features from design through production operation.
- Build a deep understanding of the systems and domains you own.
- Simplify and improve existing systems to increase team velocity, reliability, and maintainability.
- Balance technical, analytical, and product constraints to deliver practical solutions.
- Make sound technical decisions within your domain and raise architectural or operational risks early.
- Mentor and support other engineers through code reviews, design discussions, and collaborative problem solving.
- Ship meaningful services, features, and infrastructure improvements that advance the Performance Advisor platform.
Why Join This Team
- Build and operate mission-critical systems that power forecasting and recommendations at scale.
- Build and operate mission-critical systems that power forecasting, recommendations, and Performance Advisor capabilities at scale.
- Work on high-throughput distributed systems with meaningful business impact.
- Collaborate with experienced engineers, product leaders, and AI/data teams.
- Work in an environment that values execution, pragmatism, and modern engineering workflows.
- Solve complex backend and systems problems while building skills in cloud-native and AI-powered applications.
Company Summary
Zeta Global is a data-powered marketing technology company with a heritage of innovation and industry leadership. Founded in 2007 by entrepreneur David A. Steinberg and John Sculley, former CEO of Apple Inc and Pepsi-Cola, the Company combines the industry’s 3rd largest proprietary data set (2.4B+ identities) with Artificial Intelligence to unlock consumer intent, personalize experiences and help our clients drive business growth.
Zeta Global is a leading AI-powered marketing technology company that enables enterprise brands to acquire, grow, and retain customers through intelligent, data-driven engagement. At the center of its innovation is the Zeta Marketing Platform (ZMP), which unifies customer data, identity, and advanced analytics to transform billions of data signals into actionable marketing intelligence and measurable business outcomes.
Publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: ZETA), Zeta is redefining modern marketing with Athena by Zeta™, a super intelligent, conversational agent embedded in ZMP that personalizes the marketer’s workspace, surfaces platform generated insights through natural dialogue and recommends next-best actions to help brands accelerate and optimize their marketing outcomes.
Skills Required
- 8-12 years of professional software engineering experience building and operating scalable backend systems
- Hands-on ownership of production services, including performance, reliability, scalability, or cost improvements
- Strong expertise in distributed systems design, concurrency, data modeling, failure handling, and scalability tradeoffs
- Experience developing high-throughput, event-driven systems and backend APIs
- Strong hands-on experience with AWS and cloud-native system design and operations
- Experience with Kafka, Elasticsearch, NoSQL databases such as Aerospike, Thrift, and modern CI/CD pipelines
- Experience with container-based solutions and microservices architectures
- Proficiency in one or more backend languages including Python, Java, Ruby, Go, or Scala
- Experience supporting machine-learning-driven systems, forecasting, recommendations, or similar data-driven applications
- Familiarity with AI-enabled applications, LLM integrations, or agentic workflows
- Strong object-oriented programming, system design, problem-solving, critical-thinking, and communication skills
- Bachelor's or master's degree in computer science, mathematics, engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
What the Team is Saying
Zeta Global Compensation & Benefits Highlights
How does Zeta Global ensure its pay and bonus plans are competitive?
Zeta Global supports competitive compensation through a mix of base pay, equity, performance incentives, financial benefits and employee feedback-informed rewards. The company’s total rewards approach connects compensation with ownership, financial planning and benefits that support employees’ broader well-being.
- Competitive pay and incentives: Zeta lists competitive pay, equity, performance bonuses and an employee stock purchase plan as part of its compensation and total rewards offerings. Employees also describe compensation as a strength. A software engineer said Zeta offers “good compensation,” “best appraisals and pay raise” and a “supportive work environment,” while a director cited “compensation” as one of the strengths of the company.
- Equity and ownership: Zeta offers company equity and an employee stock purchase plan, giving employees ways to participate in the company’s growth. Its broader financial benefits also include a 401(k) with company match, monthly financial workshops, commuter benefits and insurance coverage, reinforcing compensation as part of a larger financial wellness package.
- Performance-oriented rewards: Employee reviews describe Zeta’s compensation as tied to performance and growth. One employee said, “Zeta pays well,” while another said compensation is “within industry range and revised every year.” A finance analyst cited “great incentives,” and a director described Zeta as a place to “shape your career” with room to move up. (Comparably; Glassdoor reviews; Indeed reviews)
- Benefits that strengthen total rewards: Zeta’s rewards package extends beyond pay through health, dental and vision insurance, mental health benefits, pet insurance, flexible time off, parental leave, adoption assistance, fertility and family-building support, travel assistance for reproductive health procedures, volunteer days and wellness resources. The company also says it uses wellness surveys and employee feedback to shape benefits updates, including expanded parental leave and adoption assistance.
- External signals:
- Compensation sentiment: Employees on external review sites describe Zeta’s compensation as “good,” “great” and competitive, with reviews citing pay raises, incentives, benefits and performance-based earning potential. (Glassdoor reviews; Indeed reviews; Comparably)
- Benefits signals: External profile data lists company equity, performance bonuses, an employee stock purchase plan and a home-office stipend for remote employees.
- Financial wellness: Zeta’s benefits include 401(k) matching, financial workshops, insurance coverage and employee stock purchase participation.
Bottom line: Zeta Global’s compensation approach combines competitive pay, performance incentives, equity, stock purchase access and broad benefits, giving employees both near-term rewards and longer-term financial participation in the company’s growth.
Zeta Global Insights
What We Do
Zeta Global (NYSE: ZETA) is the AI 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.
Why Work With Us
At Zeta, people have the freedom to think creatively, take initiative, and grow. We value curiosity, innovation, and teamwork, empowering everyone to use AI and technology in smarter ways to drive impact for clients, consumers, and each other while shaping the future together.
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Zeta Global Offices
Hybrid Workspace
Employees engage in a combination of remote and on-site work.
