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. We're hiring multiple Staff Engineers to join a small, high-performance group supporting the engineering organizations behind Sailthru, LiveIntent, and WhatCounts — the three platforms that make up Zeta Actions, a business unit within Zeta Global. You'll spend most of your time in the code, the architecture, and the hard problems these teams run into as they build and operate platforms that serve brands and publishers at massive scale.
Staff Engineers engage with teams in a few different ways — as a technical partner on complex projects, as a hands-on contributor to high-priority initiatives, or as an on-demand expert for teams that hit an architectural wall. Real scale, real complexity — billions of messages, live traffic, meaningful performance and reliability constraints.
Generative AI is part of how we work — we've adopted AI-assisted development across the engineering organization and expect our staff engineers to be fluent in these tools, not just aware of them.
Active investment in AI engineering — you'll help shape how we build AI capabilities into the platform itself, not just use them in your own workflow.
Identify systemic engineering challenges across our platforms and drive their resolution — shaping the technical backlog and near-term architecture.
Propose and validate technical approaches for problems involving scale, performance, security, or cross-team dependencies.
Lead architectural decisions for complex, ambiguous, or high-risk initiatives.
Incorporate modern industry patterns — including AI/ML tooling — into our technical strategy where it genuinely moves the needle.
Write code, review PRs, debug production issues, and optimize system performance — this is not a whiteboard-only role.
Dive deep into our AWS infrastructure, Kubernetes workloads, and JVM-based services to find and fix what's actually wrong.
Participate in our on-call rotation as a second-level escalation point for complex engineering incidents.
Step in during large incidents to help teams triage, coordinate, and resolve — and follow through with post-incident reviews that drive lasting fixes.
Champion operational excellence across our engineering teams: observability, reliability, deployment practices, and the operational habits that keep systems healthy at scale.
Partner with engineering teams as a technical point of contact on complex projects — ensuring good architectural decisions get documented and don't have to be re-litigated.
Mentor engineers across our teams, raising the technical floor through reviews, pairing, and direct feedback.
Stay close to the customer. Understand how Sailthru's platform affects the people using it, bring that context into technical decisions, and push back when engineering choices create friction for customers.
The best technical decisions happen when engineering and product are thinking together from the start.
Deep, battle-tested expertise in AWS and cloud-native architecture — you know how to build reliable, scalable systems at real traffic volumes.
Strong JVM fundamentals, primarily Java and Kotlin, with the range to work across languages as the problem demands.
Comfort working with large databases at scale — query optimization, schema design, operational concerns, and the tradeoffs between data storage approaches.
Practical experience with AI/ML engineering — whether integrating LLM capabilities, building pipelines, or evaluating where AI actually helps vs. A track record of delivering large, complex initiatives in ambiguous environments — scoping, driving alignment, and shipping.
Strong debugging instincts and a bias toward root-cause analysis over symptomatic fixes.
Fluency with AI-driven development tools — Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Codex, or similar — is a firm requirement. The ability to quickly map an existing architecture — identify bottlenecks, constraints, and opportunities — and turn that understanding into concrete, actionable proposals that increase team velocity.
Experience with PHP or Python is a plus. Knowledge of the Databricks platform and data engineering practices (pipelines, lakehouses, batch and streaming processing) is a bonus.
This role sits within Zeta Actions — the Zeta Global business unit encompassing Sailthru, LiveIntent, and WhatCounts. We're remote-first with engineers across the US. The scale of what these platforms do — high-volume delivery, real-time identity resolution, personalization at billions of touchpoints — means the problems are genuinely hard. Excellent medical, dental, and vision coverage
Employee Equity and Stock Purchase Plan
Employee Discounts, Virtual Wellness Classes, andPet Insurance And more!!
Zeta considers applicants for employment without regard to and does not discriminate on the basis of an individual’s sex, race, color, religion, age, disability, status as a veteran, or national or ethnic origin; We’re committed to building a workplace culture of trust and belonging, so everyone feels invited to bring their whole selves to work. Learn more about our commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion here:
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