Remote Staff Software Engineer

WHO WE ARE

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The Role

Were 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. This is a deeply technical IC role. Youll 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. The common thread is that youre someone teams want in the room when things get hard.

Why This Role

Real scale, real complexity — billions of messages, live traffic, meaningful performance and reliability constraints.

Generative AI is part of how we work — weve 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 — youll help shape how we build AI capabilities into the platform itself, not just use them in your own workflow.

Real autonomy — you wont be handed a backlog. Youll be expected to find the important problems, make the case for solving them, and drive them to resolution. The best staff engineers here create their own leverage.

Curiosity is a first-class trait on this team. We value engineers who read widely, ask uncomfortable questions, and arent satisfied with how things work until they understand why.

What Youll Do

Technical Leadership

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.

Hands-On Execution

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 whats 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.

Cross-Team Influence

Partner with engineering teams as a technical point of contact on complex projects — ensuring good architectural decisions get documented and dont have to be re-litigated.

Work directly with Engineering Managers to align technical work with team and product priorities.

Mentor engineers across our teams, raising the technical floor through reviews, pairing, and direct feedback.

Stay close to the customer. Understand how Sailthrus platform affects the people using it, bring that context into technical decisions, and push back when engineering choices create friction for customers.

Partner closely with the product team — contribute to shaping what gets built, not just how. The best technical decisions happen when engineering and product are thinking together from the start.

What Youll Bring

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.

Hands-on Kubernetes experience — deploying, operating, and troubleshooting workloads in production.

Experience designing and operating distributed systems — fault tolerance, consistency tradeoffs, service coordination, and failure modes at scale.

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. adds complexity.

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.

The judgment to know when to push for the right solution and when pragmatism wins.

Fluency with AI-driven development tools — Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Codex, or similar — is a firm requirement. We use these tools daily and expect staff engineers to be effective with them and to model best practices around prompt discipline, output validation, and security.

Comfort operating without a playbook — youve solved novel problems before and know how to navigate uncertainty.

Comfort working in and around legacy codebases — you can read unfamiliar code, understand systems that predate you, and make meaningful improvements without needing a rewrite.

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.

You think big. Youre not constrained by how things are done today — you can envision meaningfully better outcomes and work backwards from them to find a path.

Bias for action. Youd rather move with imperfect information and course-correct than wait for certainty that never comes. You know the difference between a reversible decision and one that warrants more care.

Experience with PHP or Python is a plus. Familiarity with high-volume messaging infrastructure or email/marketing tech is welcome but not required. Knowledge of the Databricks platform and data engineering practices (pipelines, lakehouses, batch and streaming processing) is a bonus.

Working Here

This role sits within Zeta Actions — the Zeta Global business unit encompassing Sailthru, LiveIntent, and WhatCounts. Were 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. If thats what energizes you, wed like to hear from you.

BENEFITS & PERKS

Unlimited PTO

Excellent medical, dental, and vision coverage

Employee Equity and Stock Purchase Plan

Employee Discounts, Virtual Wellness Classes, andPet Insurance And more!!

SALARY RANGE

The salary range for this role is $160,000 - $180,000, depending on location and experience.

PEOPLE & CULTURE AT ZETA

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; nor does Zeta discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity or expression.

We’re committed to building a workplace culture of trust and belonging, so everyone feels invited to bring their whole selves to work. We provide a forum for employees to celebrate, support and advocate for one another. Learn more about our commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion here: 

ZETA IN THE NEWS!

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