Staff Software Engineer (Performance Advisor)
Zeta
San Francisco, United States Posted October 15, 2026
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Salary Range
$220,000 - $240,000
Job Description
Join our team as a Staff Software Engineer, where you will provide technical leadership for our Forecasting and Recommendations platforms. You will design, build, and operate high-throughput, low-latency distributed systems that power forecasting, recommendations, and AI-driven decision-making at scale. You will work deeply in backend systems, infrastructure, and AI application architecture, while remaining accountable for reliability, observability, and operational excellence.
- Design, build, and operate systems supporting forecasting, recommendations, and agentic AI workflows in production.
- Write production-quality code daily; own services end-to-end from design through on-call and incident resolution.
- Champion observability and reliability: metrics, logging, tracing, alerting, and post-incident analysis.
- We are looking for an engineer who can contribute immediately, has shouldered real production incidents, and brings strong judgment around building stable, observable, and scalable systems, including modern agentic and LLM-powered applications
- 2+ years of experience in Python and proficiency in one or more backend languages commonly used for large-scale systems (e.g., Python, Java, Go, Scala)
- Expert-level experience with AWS, including designing, deploying, and operating large-scale cloud-native systems
- Bachelor’s or master’s degree in computer science, Mathematics, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
- 12+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating production-grade distributed systems
- Strong hands-on experience with Kubernetes, containerized microservices, and modern CI/CD pipelines
- Experience operating software in both on-prem data center and AWS cloud environments
- Fluency with modern AI-assisted development tools (e.g., Cursor, GitHub Copilot) and comfort working in “vibe coding”–style workflows that favor fast iteration, tight feedback loops, and continuous refactoring
- Deep expertise in systems design, including service boundaries, concurrency, data modeling, failure handling, and scalability tradeoffs
- A strong track record of hands-on ownership of business-critical services, including measurable improvements in latency, throughput, stability, or cost
- Production experience supporting machine learning–driven systems (forecasting, recommendations, or similar), with emphasis on serving, pipelines, and infrastructure
- Own and deeply understand large portions of the codebase and system architecture
- Simplify complex systems to increase team velocity and reliability
- Influence standards and architectural decisions across teams through credibility and collaboration
- Be a prolific, hands-on contributor who raises the bar through example
- Ship multiple large services, shared libraries, or major infrastructure improvements
- Balance technical, analytical, and product constraints to deliver pragmatic solutions
- Set short- to medium-term (6–12 month) technical direction for your domain
Required Skills
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