Lead Software Engineer

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 behavioural, 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. You Will: 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 decisions. You Have: 7+ 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, Elasticsearch) Knowledge of performance optimization and resilience patterns (caching, retries, fault tolerance). Familiarity with CI/CD and automated testing practices for backend services. Strong communication skills and a track record of driving technical direction and mentoring teams. Bonus Skills: 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. Company Summary: Zeta Global is a NYSE listed data-powered marketing technology company with a heritage of innovation and industry leadership. Founded in 2007 by entrepreneur David A.