Staff Software Engineer, Streaming

About this role

Attentive® is the AI marketing platform for 1:1 personalization redefining the way brands and people connect. We’re the only marketing platform that combines powerful technology with human expertise to build authentic customer relationships. By unifying SMS, RCS, email, and push notifications, our AI-powered personalization engine delivers bespoke experiences that drive performance, revenue, and loyalty through real-time behavioral insights.

Recognized as the #1 provider in SMS Marketing by G2, Attentive partners with more than 8,000 customers across 70+ industries. Leading global brands like Crate and Barrel, Urban Outfitters, and Carter’s work with us to enable billions of interactions that power tens of billions in revenue for our customers.

With a distributed global workforce and employee hubs in New York City, San Francisco, London, and Sydney, Attentive’s team has been consistently recognized for its performance and culture. We’re proud to be included in Deloitte’s Fast 500 (four years running!), LinkedIn’s Top Startups , Forbes’ Cloud 100 (five years running!), Inc.’s Best Workplaces , and the Human Rights Campaign Foundation's Corporate Equality Index !

About the Role

Attentive’s streaming platform is the backbone of our messaging and personalization ecosystem, powering billions of events and processing over 2 million messages per second in real time. It sits at the center of how engineering teams across Attentive build responsive, customer-facing products at scale.

We’re looking for a Staff Software Engineer to help lead the evolution of this platform into its next generation. In this role, you’ll set technical direction for streaming architecture across the company, drive major modernization efforts, and build the primitives, tooling, and standards that enable product and data teams to move faster with confidence. Your impact will extend well beyond a single service or team: you’ll shape how Attentive scales real-time systems, improves reliability and observability, and unlocks new capabilities for experimentation, personalization, and growth.

This is a high-leverage role for an engineer who thrives on solving deeply technical distributed systems problems, influencing platform strategy, and raising the bar for how we build and operate streaming infrastructure across the organization.

What You’ll Accomplish

• Architect and evolve Attentive’s next-generation event streaming platform; design high-throughput, low-latency, and cost-efficient solutions that power mission-critical products and use cases across Attentive’s ecosystem

• Enhance streaming developer experience: Build and refine self-serve tools for event observability, debugging, load testing, and system configuration, empowering teams to experiment independently and ship quickly

• Simplify and modernize streaming architecture: Remove unnecessary abstraction layers, enable direct access for power users, and ensure the platform is flexible for both “paved path” and advanced use cases

• Solve complex distributed systems challenges with primitives for reliable stream processing: rate limiting, deduping, delayed message delivery, etc

• Champion best practices and technology selection: Stay ahead of industry advancements in event streaming, advocating for tools and approaches that balance innovation with long-term reliability

• Collaborate across engineering: Partner with product, data, and infrastructure teams to launch new customer-facing features, integrations, and scalable solutions built on streaming infrastructure

Your Expertise

• 10+ years of experience architecting and supporting high-throughput, distributed systems at scale—especially those involving event streaming or messaging platforms

• Strong expertise in the internals, tradeoffs, and operating models of distributed streaming technologies such as Kafka, Flink, Pulsar, and/or Spark

• Proven track record of leading major platform or architectural initiatives that span multiple teams, including modernization, migration, simplification, or adoption of new infrastructure patterns

• Deep experience designing systems for scale, reliability, debuggability, and efficiency, including handling high-throughput workloads and complex failure scenarios in production

• Strong proficiency in Java and backend systems design, with the ability to work across application, platform, and infrastructure layers

• Able to debug and optimize end-to-end streaming systems, from schemas and serialization to consumer behavior, JVM performance, networking, and infrastructure bottlenecks

• Familiar with resource scheduling, data locality, and how infrastructure choices impact cost and system behavior

• Experience with observability and developer tooling for streaming (e.g., tracing, metrics, replay)

• Infrastructure-as-code expertise (Terraform, Helm), comfortable with Kubernetes (EKS) and cloud-native environments

• Demonstrated ability to influence technical strategy, communicate tradeoffs clearly, and lead through collaboration rather than authority

• Excitement for tackling ambiguous, high-impact platform problems in a fast-moving environment, with sound judgment about where to innovate versus standardize

What We Use

• Our backend is Java / Kotlin / Spring Boot microservices, built with Gradle, coupled with things like DynamoDB, Aurora, AirFlow, Postgres, and Redis, hosted via AWS

• Our infrastructure runs primarily in Kubernetes hosted in AWS’s EKS, using tooling like Istio, Datadog, Terraform, CloudFlare, and Helm

• Our frontend is built with React and TypeScript, and uses best practices like GraphQL, Storybook, Radix UI, Vite, esbuild, and Playwright

• Our automation is driven by custom and open source machine learning models, industry-leading LLMs, lots of data and tech like Python, Metaflow, HuggingFace, PyTorch, TensorFlow, and Pandas

You'll get competitive perks and benefits , from health & wellness to equity, to help you bring your best self to work.

Fo

Similar jobs

• Senior Software Engineer, Streaming — Attentive · United States
• Staff Software Engineer, Stream Compute — Stripe · San Francisco, Seattle, New York, Toronto
• Senior Software Engineer - Streaming Platform — Datadog · New York, New York, USA
• Software Engineer, Streaming Systems — Hightouch · Remote
• Staff Software Engineer, Event Streaming Systems — Doordashusa · New York, NY
• Senior Software Engineer - Streaming Platform Client — Datadog · New York, New York, USA
• Senior Software Engineer, Video Streaming — Nuro · Mountain View, California (HQ)
• Staff Backend Engineer - Streaming — Verkada · San Mateo, CA United States