Staff Software Engineer, Streaming

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.

• 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

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