Staff Software Engineer, Segment Personalization

About the Attentive Team

Have you ever received a text message from your favorite brand with an incredible offer?  Did you know that text message marketing delivers the highest ROI of any marketing channel?  And that more customers than ever prefer to connect with brands via text?  That is what we do at Attentive.  We empower the world’s leading brands to engage with their customers at the right moment, with the right message. Our platform powers more than 400 million messages every day, approaching 100 billion annually.

We’re building big things!  Check out our tech blog here: https://tech.attentive.com/

About the Role

Our Segment Personalization team is the foundation of Attentive's personalization capabilities, processing and serving data for over 100 million customers daily to enable AI-driven, personalized customer experiences. We operate mission-critical infrastructure that powers product recommendations, audience segmentation, and personalized content across the platform. Our systems handle billions of events, serve millions of API requests daily, and leverage real-time stream processing and ML-powered recommendation engines.

Joining our team offers a high-growth career opportunity to work on some of the most challenging distributed systems and personalization problems in martech, collaborating with world-class engineers in a high-performance, high-impact culture.

As a Staff Software Engineer, you will architect the next generation of Attentive's personalization infrastructure as we expand to encompass customer data and behavioral signals. You will lead technical strategy across teams, design distributed systems that operate at massive scale, and drive architectural decisions that enable platform-wide personalization. Your role will include mentoring engineers across the organization, setting technical direction for complex cross-functional initiatives, and shaping how Attentive delivers personalized experiences to millions of customers.

This team owns the data infrastructure that makes personalization possible at Attentive. By architecting scalable, intelligent systems that understand both products and customers, you'll enable our clients to deliver more relevant, engaging messages that drive higher performance and better customer experiences.

What You’ll Accomplish

• Architect the evolution of Attentive's personalization infrastructure to a unified platform encompassing customer, product, and behavioral data.
• Lead technical strategy across multiple teams, designing distributed systems that operate at massive scale (billions of events, 100M+ customers) with high reliability and performance.
• Partner with engineering, product, and ML teams to design and deliver complex cross-functional initiatives with strategic business impact.
• Mentor Staff, Senior, and Mid-level engineers across the organization, raising the technical bar and influencing best practices for distributed systems, data architecture, and ML integration.

Your Expertise

• 7+ years experience as a Software Engineer with a focus on high-throughput distributed systems, with proven impact leading complex, cross-team initiatives.
• You have deep expertise in distributed systems design, data architecture, and optimization at scale, with strong fundamentals in algorithms and system performance.
• You are highly knowledgeable about data modeling, data access, and data storage with relational and non-relational databases, with experience making architectural decisions for systems serving millions of requests.
• You are known for high development velocity and outsized impact. You identify the areas of greatest need, create clear technical plans, and drive execution across teams.
• You are an empathetic communicator and mentor who influences technical decisions across teams, coordinates complex cross-functional work, and elevates engineering practices organization-wide.

What We Use

• Our infrastructure runs primarily in Kubernetes hosted in AWS's EKS.
• Our backend is Java / Spring Boot microservices, built with Gradle, coupled with PostgreSQL, Redis, Temporal workflows, Pulsar and Kinesis streams, and ClickHouse for analytics, all hosted via AWS.
• Our ML-powered personalization is built with PyTorch and libtorch (PyTorch C++) for recommendation engines, vector embeddings for product and customer understanding, and ClickHouse for high-performance affinity calculations.
• Our data ingestion pipelines process billions of events from multiple sources (Shopify, Google, Public API) through real-time stream processing and validation.

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 $180,000 - $240,000 annually + equity + benefits
• Our salary ranges are determined by role, level and location

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