{"id":19025,"url":"https://alion.io/job/zeta-global-staff-software-engineer","title":"Staff Software Engineer","company":{"id":5444,"name":"Zeta Global","domain":"zetaglobal.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/zeta-global","size_band":"1001-5000","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Greenhouse","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":87,"open_postings":54,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.333,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":92,"computed_at":"2026-10-06T05:45:30Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"staff","employment_type":null,"work_mode":"remote","remote_scope":"stated_countries","remote_scope_basis":"posting_text","remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":[],"countries":[],"hiring_countries":["US"],"hiring_countries_total":1,"salary":{"min":160000,"max":180000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":180000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"Claude Code","optional":false},{"name":"Copilot","optional":false},{"name":"Java","optional":false},{"name":"Kotlin","optional":false},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"OpenAI Codex","optional":false},{"name":"PHP","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"Databricks","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-05-28T17:51:53Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-06-23","last_verified_at":"2026-10-06T22:49:41Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":131,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":0,"flags":[],"days_open":130},"description":"WHO WE ARE \nZeta 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. Zeta was founded in 2007 by David A. Steinberg and John Sculley and is headquartered in New York City with offices around the world. To learn more, go to www.zetaglobal.com. \nThe Role \nWe'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. This is a deeply technical IC role. 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. \nStaff 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 you're someone teams want in the room when things get hard. \nWhy This Role \nReal scale, real complexity - billions of messages, live traffic, meaningful performance and reliability constraints. \nGenerative 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. \nActive 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. \nReal autonomy - you won't be handed a backlog. You'll 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. \nCuriosity is a first-class trait on this team. We value engineers who read widely, ask uncomfortable questions, and aren't satisfied with how things work until they understand why. \nWhat You'll Do \nTechnical Leadership \nIdentify systemic engineering challenges across our platforms and drive their resolution - shaping the technical backlog and near-term architecture. \nPropose and validate technical approaches for problems involving scale, performance, security, or cross-team dependencies. \nLead architectural decisions for complex, ambiguous, or high-risk initiatives. \nIncorporate modern industry patterns - including AI/ML tooling - into our technical strategy where it genuinely moves the needle. \nHands-On Execution \nWrite code, review PRs, debug production issues, and optimize system performance - this is not a whiteboard-only role. \nDive deep into our AWS infrastructure, Kubernetes workloads, and JVM-based services to find and fix what's actually wrong. \nParticipate in our on-call rotation as a second-level escalation point for complex engineering incidents. \nStep in during large incidents to help teams triage, coordinate, and resolve - and follow through with post-incident reviews that drive lasting fixes. \nChampion operational excellence across our engineering teams: observability, reliability, deployment practices, and the operational habits that keep systems healthy at scale. \nCross-Team Influence \nPartner 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. \nWork directly with Engineering Managers to align technical work with team and product priorities. \nMentor engineers across our teams, raising the technical floor through reviews, pairing, and direct feedback. \nStay 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. \nPartner 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. \nWhat You'll Bring \nDeep, battle-tested expertise in AWS and cloud-native architecture - you know how to build reliable, scalable systems at real traffic volumes. \nStrong JVM fundamentals, primarily Java and Kotlin, with the range to work across languages as the problem demands. \nHands-on Kubernetes experience - deploying, operating, and troubleshooting workloads in production. \nExperience designing and operating distributed systems - fault tolerance, consistency tradeoffs, service coordination, and failure modes at scale. \nComfort working with large databases at scale - query optimization, schema design, operational concerns, and the tradeoffs between data storage approaches. \nPractical experience with AI/ML engineering - whether integrating LLM capabilities, building pipelines, or evaluating where AI actually helps vs. adds complexity. \nA track record of delivering large, complex initiatives in ambiguous environments - scoping, driving alignment, and shipping. \nStrong debugging instincts and a bias toward root-cause analysis over symptomatic fixes. \nThe judgment to know when to push for the right solution and when pragmatism wins. \nFluency 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. \nComfort operating without a playbook - you've solved novel problems before and know how to navigate uncertainty. \nComfort working in and around legacy codebases - you can read unfamiliar code, understand systems that predate you, and make meaningful improvements without needing a rewrite. \nThe ability to quickly map an existing architecture - identify bottlenecks, constraints, and opportunities - and turn that understanding into concrete, actionable proposals that increase team velocity. \nYou think big. You're not constrained by how things are done today - you can envision meaningfully better outcomes and work backwards from them to find a path. \nBias for action. You'd 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. \nExperience 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. \nWorking Here \nThis 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. If that's what energizes you, we'd like to hear from you. \nBENEFITS & PERKS \nUnlimited PTO \nExcellent medical, dental, and vision coverage \nEmployee Equity and Stock Purchase Plan \nEmployee Discounts, Virtual Wellness Classes, andPet Insurance And more!! \nSALARY RANGE \nThe salary range for this role is $160,000 - $180,000, depending on location and experience. \nPEOPLE & CULTURE AT ZETA \nZeta 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. \nWe’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: https://zetaglobal.com/blog/a-look-into-zetas-ergs/ \nZETA IN THE NEWS! \nhttps://zetaglobal.com/press/?cat=press-releases","description_format":"text","description_chars":8649,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity","Unlimited PTO"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Artificial Intelligence"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-05-28T17:51:53Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":32,"band":"fade","label":"Fading","p_open":1,"p_active":0.724,"p_room":0.44,"age_days":130,"expected_fill_days":92,"reasons":["conf:1","wave","velocity","win:tail","crowd:brand"],"computed_at":"2026-10-06T05:45:30Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":180000,"is_top_pay":false},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/zeta-global-staff-software-engineer","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/zeta-global-staff-software-engineer.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-06T23:22:53Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":4736,"day_limit":5000,"remaining_today":264,"minute_limit":60,"resets_at":"2026-10-07T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":5444},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=5444"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fzeta-global-staff-software-engineer"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fzeta-global-staff-software-engineer"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fzeta-global-staff-software-engineer"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/zeta-global-staff-software-engineer\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fzeta-global-staff-software-engineer"}]}