Senior DSP Engineer — AdTech

WHO WE ARE

Zeta 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 industrys 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 .

The Role

Were looking for a Senior / Staff DSP Engineer to build and evolve Zetas real-time bidding and decisioning systems. This is a hands-on role focused on designing and operating low-latency high-throughput services that process bid requests score opportunities apply pacing and budget constraints and produce bids within strict SLAs.

Youll work closely with platform data and ML teams to integrate retrieval and scoring systems into the bidder while keeping the hot path fast safe and observable. This role is ideal for engineers who love distributed systems performance engineering and building production-grade systems at extreme scale.

What Youll Do

• Real-Time Bidding Systems: Design and build core DSP bidder components that handle high-QPS bid request ingestion filtering enrichment decisioning and bid response generation within strict time budgets.
• Auction & Eligibility Logic: Implement auction logic campaign/line-item eligibility targeting constraints frequency controls supply quality checks and policy enforcement.
• Low-Latency Engineering: Optimize p99 latency and tail behavior using timeouts backpressure concurrency control efficient serialization caching strategies and careful memory/GC management.
• Pacing & Budgeting: Build and extend pacing and budget management logic (spend controls throttling goal-based pacing safety constraints) and integrate with control-plane services (campaign config feature flags budgets).
• Scoring & ML Integration: Integrate real-time model scoring and feature retrieval systems with production guardrails (shadow mode A/B tests canaries circuit breakers fallbacks).
• Reliability & Operations: Define SLOs and observability (metrics tracing structured logging) participate in on-call and drive post-incident improvements.
• AWS at Scale: Build and operate services on AWS (compute networking autoscaling streaming data stores) and partner on cost/performance optimization.

Engineering Leadership (Staff scope): For staff-level candidates drive technical direction for parts of the bidder stack (interfaces service boundaries performance budgets) and mentor engineers through design/code reviews and best practices.

Senior: 5 years of software engineering (with substantial backend/distributed systems work). Staff: 8 years with demonstrated ownership of large-scale production systems.

• Proven experience building low-latency high-QPS services (real-time decisioning trading ad serving marketplaces or similar).
• Strong proficiency in Java and/or Go for performance-oriented backend development.
• Solid understanding of distributed systems fundamentals: consistency trade-offs caching failure modes retries/timeouts backpressure load shedding.
• Experience operating production services on AWS and making practical cost/performance trade-offs.
• Experience with data stores and patterns used in real-time systems (e.g. Redis/Memcached DynamoDB/Cassandra Kafka/Kinesis).
• Strong debugging skills across services: profiling tracing heap/GC analysis latency investigations.
• Clear communicator and collaborator; able to work effectively with engineering product and ML partners.
• Able to explain complex systems to mixed audiences.
• Hands-on DSP / RTB experience: OpenRTB exchanges SSP integrations seats/accounts bid request/response handling.

• Experience with pacing/budgeting systems bid shading dynamic floors and supply quality/brand-safety gating.
• Experience integrating ML ranking/scoring in real time (feature retrieval embeddings model serving inference optimization).
• Experience building privacy-aware systems (consent/identity signals PII-safe logging governance controls).
• Experience operating extremely high-scale systems (10^510^6 QPS) multi-region design or hybrid/colocation architectures.
• Kubernetes/service mesh familiarity and/or deep Linux networking/performance knowledge (eBPF is a plus).

BENEFITS & PERKS

• Excellent medical dental and vision coverage

PEOPLE & CULTURE AT ZETA

Zeta considers applicants for employment without regard to and does not discriminate on the basis of an individuals 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.

Were 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: IN THE NEWS!

Experience:

Senior IC