Staff Software Engineer
About the role:
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.
What You’ll Do :
- 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.
What We’re Looking For :
- 12+ 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.
Staff-Level Expectations
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.
Why Join This Team
- Build and operate mission-critical systems that power forecasting and recommendations at scale.
- Work in an environment that values execution, pragmatism, and modern engineering workflows.
- Operate at true Staff scope with real architectural ownership and hands-on impact.
- Solve hard systems problems with meaningful business outcomes.
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 superintelligent, 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
- 12+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating production-grade distributed systems
- Hands-on ownership of business-critical services with 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, including serving, pipelines, and infrastructure
- Expert-level AWS experience 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 on-premises data centers and AWS cloud environments
- Fluency with AI-assisted development tools such as Cursor and GitHub Copilot
- Proficiency in one or more backend languages such as Python, Java, Go, or Scala
- Bachelor’s or master’s degree in computer science, mathematics, 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.
