Senior Engineer, Data Platform

About this job

As a Senior Engineer, Data Platform at Zeta Global, you will join a data-powered marketing technology company to build and operate robust data infrastructure powering analytics, products, AI systems, and machine learning. Zeta Global combines a massive proprietary data asset with artificial intelligence to help enterprise brands grow through the Zeta Marketing Platform and innovations like Athena by Zeta. In this role, you will take broad ownership across Lakehouse architecture, distributed compute, data quality, governance, lineage, security, access controls, and operational systems. A normal day involves building type-safe data pipelines, operating Spark workloads on dynamic Hadoop clusters, evaluating compute and query engines, and collaborating closely with data scientists, product teams, and data engineers. You will also help improve platform observability, developer tooling, and system reliability while mentoring other engineers.

Responsibilities

• Build and operate Lakehouse, Spark, and distributed data-processing systems.
• Improve the performance, reliability, cost, and operational visibility of platform workloads.
• Develop capabilities for data quality, governance, lineage, metadata, discoverability, security, and access control.
• Build the data context required for trusted reporting, ML models, and AI agents.
• Evaluate compute and query engines for read-heavy workloads while assessing cost, performance, and reliability.
• Assess real-time OLAP technologies to identify appropriate production use cases.
• Improve deployment, observability, incident response, developer tooling, and platform operations.
• Partner with data scientists and engineers to enhance their platform experience and mentor team members.

Requirements

• 7+ years of software engineering experience.
• Strong experience in Python, Scala, Java, or another JVM language.
• Experience with Spark or another distributed data-processing framework.
• Experience building or operating production data platforms, backend systems, or distributed systems.
• Familiarity with at least 1 area such as Lakehouse architecture, Apache Iceberg, data quality, governance, lineage, metadata, query engines, or real-time OLAP.
• Working knowledge of AWS services including EC2, S3, Athena, and IAM.
• Experience improving production reliability through monitoring, alerting, deployment automation, and incident response.
• Strong analytical, communication, and collaboration skills.

Good to have

• Experience with Kubernetes and Terraform
• Experience with Airflow
• Experience with Trino
• Experience with ClickHouse, Starrocks, or Pinot
• Contributing fixes and improvements to open-source projects like Spark, Iceberg, and Airflow

Who should apply

This role suits experienced software engineers with a strong background in distributed systems, data platforms, and big data technologies who want to take ownership of large-scale infrastructure at Zeta Global. Candidates should have extensive experience with JVM languages or Python, working knowledge of AWS, and a track record of improving production reliability and data governance. Freshers should not apply as 7+ years of software engineering experience is required.

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