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Staff Software Engineer, Streaming

United States
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

  • Event streaming: Apache Kafka, Pulsar, Flink.
  • Cloud infrastructure: AWS EKS (Kubernetes), Terraform, Helm, Datadog, Istio, CloudFlare.
  • Backend: Java, Spring Boot, Gradle, DynamoDB, Postgres, Redis, and other AWS-native services.
  • Frontend/tools: (As relevant for observability dashboards) React, TypeScript, GraphQL, Storybook, Vite.
  • Automation/data: Python, open-source frameworks for testing and observability, with integrations for ML and analytics use cases.

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

For US based applicants:

  • The US base salary range for this full-time position is $209,200 - $250,000 annually + equity + benefits
  • Our salary ranges are determined by role, level and location

#LI-CM1

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Attentive Company Values
Default to Action - Move swiftly and with purpose
Be One Unstoppable Team - Rally as each other’s champions
Champion the Customer - Our success is defined by our customers' success
Act Like an Owner - Take responsibility for Attentive’s success
 
Learn more about AWAKE, Attentive’s collective of employee resource groups.
 
If you do not meet all the requirements listed here, we still encourage you to apply! No job description is perfect, and we may also have another opportunity that closely matches your skills and experience.
 
At Attentive, we know that our Company's strength lies in the diversity of our employees. Attentive is an Equal Opportunity Employer and we welcome applicants from all backgrounds. Our policy is to provide equal employment opportunities for all employees, applicants and covered individuals regardless of protected characteristics. We prioritize and maintain a fair, inclusive and equitable workplace free from discrimination, harassment, and retaliation. Attentive is also committed to providing reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities. If you need any assistance or reasonable accommodations, please let your recruiter know. 

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Our company values diversity. To ensure that we comply with reporting requirements and to learn more about how we can increase diversity in our candidate pool, we invite you to voluntarily provide demographic information in a confidential survey at the end of this application. Providing this information is optional. It will not be accessible or used in the hiring process, and has no effect on your opportunity for employment.

 

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