Lead Backend Engineer

About the role

As a Lead Backend Engineer, you will play a key role in designing, building, and owning the distributed systems that power Zeta’s CRM platform. You will collaborate closely with engineers and product managers to shape the technical roadmap and deliver a next-generation, multichannel marketing platform that unifies data across digital touchpoints and drives measurable marketing outcomes.

You are expected to bring deep expertise in distributed systems and cloud-native architectures, along with extensive experience designing and developing highly scalable backend services. The role requires a strong focus on highthroughput systems, with careful attention to performance, scalability, reliability, and concurrency, while also providing technical leadership and guidance to the engineering team.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design and development of next-generation mobile communication services such as SMS, MMS, and RCS (Rich Communication Services), enabling scalable and reliable messaging capabilities. Experience with RCS implementations is a strong advantage.

• Translate business and product requirements into scalable backend architectures and core platform components for a real-world marketing automation platform.

• Architect, design, and develop high-performance backend services and APIs that meet evolving product and platform requirements.

• Ensure high product quality through rigorous code reviews, testing strategies, and adherence to engineering best practices.

• Drive continuous improvement by debugging issues, resolving production problems, and implementing performance and feature enhancements.

• Take end-to-end ownership of critical platform components, leading their design, development, scalability, and reliability while guiding engineering best practices.

Requirements

• We are seeking exceptional engineering talent with strong academic credentials and a solid foundation in computer science, distributed systems design, and large-scale backend platform development.

• The candidate should have 10+ years of experience building scalable, reliable backend systems using languages such as Java, Python, Ruby, or similar server-side technologies.

• A Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field from a university where the primary language of instruction is English is strongly preferred.

• Excellent communication and collaboration skills are essential to work effectively within large, distributed, cross-functional engineering teams.

Qualification

• BS or MS in Computer Science or related field

• 8-12 years of working experience with Python, Ruby and/or J2EE technology, with at least 3-5 years of experience as a hands-on Lead engineer/technical architect

• Strong experience with distributed systems and data infrastructure technologies, including Kafka, Elasticsearch, and NoSQL databases such as Aerospike

• Familiarity in data warehousing solutions like Snowflake, ClickHouse, or Redshift, and working knowledge of Thrift, CI/CD pipelines, and AWS cloud services.

• Experience working with container-based solutions.

• Experience with multi-tenant architectures (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS)

• Experience building RESTful web services, Microservices

• Experience owning and operating multiple instances of mission-critical service

• Experience with Agile development methodology and Test-Driven Development

• Experience building real-time streaming data pipelines that scale horizontally

• Demonstrated working experience with, and quick adoption of, AI tools and AI-based development practices.

• Experience working in a fast-paced technology environment.

• Excellent problem-solving, critical thinking, and communication skills.

Company Summary

Zeta Global is a data-powered marketing technology company with a heritage of innovation and industry leadership. Founded in 2007 by entrepreneur David A. Steinberg and John Sculley, former CEO of Apple Inc and Pepsi-Cola, the Company combines the industry’s 3rd largest proprietary data set (2.4B+ identities) with Artificial Intelligence to unlock consumer intent, personalize experiences and help our clients drive business growth.

Zeta Global is a leading AI-powered marketing technology company that enables enterprise brands to acquire, grow, and retain customers through intelligent, data-driven engagement. At the center of its innovation is the Zeta Marketing Platform (ZMP), which unifies customer data, identity, and advanced analytics to transform billions of data signals into actionable marketing intelligence and measurable business outcomes.

Publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: ZETA), Zeta is redefining modern marketing with Athena by Zeta™, a superintelligent, conversational agent embedded in ZMP that personalizes the marketer’s workspace, surfaces platform generated insights through natural dialogue and recommends next-best actions to help brands accelerate and optimize their marketing outcomes.