Lead Software Engineer

### Who you are
- 5+ years of experience in backend and/or data engineering at scale
- Strong skills in Python, Java, or Scala, with expertise in APIs, distributed systems, and event-driven design
- Hands-on experience with Kafka (or similar), Spark/Hive/Flink, and workflow schedulers (Airflow/Luigi)
- Proficiency with Kubernetes (EKS preferred) and deployment practices (Helm, service meshes)
- Solid knowledge of SQL, data modelling, and cloud platforms (AWS)
- Familiarity with columnar / NoSQL databases (Aerospike, Snowflake, HBase, Scylla, Couchbase)
- Strong communication skills and a track record of driving technical direction and mentoring teams
- Experience with large-scale or multi-tenant distributed systems
- Exposure to real-time streaming frameworks (Flink, Storm)
- Knowledge of open table formats (Iceberg, Hudi, Delta Lake)
- Background in security, compliance, or privacy related to identity systems

### What the job involves
- At Zeta Global, identity is at the core of our marketing cloud
- The Identity team builds and operates backend services that power the Zeta Identity Graph - collecting, resolving, and maintaining billions of behavioral, demographic, and transactional signals
- These services enable people-based marketing at scale, ensure trust and transparency in how identity data is managed, and provide critical APIs and event streams consumed across Zeta’s platform
- Our systems support more than 235 million consumer profiles and process billions of events monthly, requiring services that are highly available, low-latency, and built to scale
- We are looking for a Lead Software Engineer who brings strength in both backend distributed systems and data engineering
- In this role, you’ll design APIs and event-driven services, scale our systems to handle rapidly growing data volumes, and modernize our platform for resilience, transparency, and performance
- Design and build backend services and APIs for identity resolution, graph transparency, and integrations
- Develop and optimize event-driven pipelines and workflows processing billions of signals
- Deploy and operate cloud-native services on EKS/Kubernetes, leveraging Helm for repeatable deployments
- Ensure reliability, observability, and scalability across services and data pipelines
- Collaborate across engineering, product, and data teams to deliver end-to-end identity solutions
- Mentor engineers and influence architecture and roadmap