Staff Software Engineer, Streaming

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 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.

US base salary range for this full-time position is $180,000 - $250,000 annually + equity + benefits.