Lead Software Engineer (Identity)

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- Strong skills in Python, Java, or Scala, with expertise in APIs, distributed systems, and event-driven design

5+ years of experience in backend and/or data engineering at scale

Familiarity with columnar / NoSQL databases (Aerospike, Snowflake, HBase, Scylla, Couchbase)

Proficiency with Kubernetes (EKS preferred) and deployment practices (Helm, service meshes)

Hands-on experience with Kafka (or similar), Spark/Hive/Flink, and workflow schedulers (Airflow/Luigi)

Solid knowledge of SQL, data modelling, and cloud platforms (AWS)

Strong communication skills and a track record of driving technical direction and mentoring teams

Background in security, compliance, or privacy related to identity systems

Knowledge of open table formats (Iceberg, Hudi, Delta Lake)

Exposure to real-time streaming frameworks (Flink, Storm)

Experience with large-scale or multi-tenant distributed systems