The Senior Software Engineer will enhance Attentive's event streaming platform, architect high-throughput systems, improve tools for product teams, and tackle complex distributed challenges. Responsibilities include collaborating on messaging systems and modernizing the architecture.
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
We’re looking for a highly driven Senior Software Engineer to join our Streaming team, which powers the backbone of Attentive’s messaging and personalization platform. Our event streaming systems handle over 2 million messages per second and sit at the heart of how product and data engineering teams build real-time, customer-facing experiences.
In this role, you’ll help shape the future of our streaming architecture, moving us to modern platforms, and unlocking new capabilities for debugging, load testing, and observability. Your work won’t just keep the pipes flowing it will directly influence how quickly we can experiment, personalize, and scale across millions of devices and billions of events.
What You’ll Accomplish
- Architect and evolve Attentive’s next-generation event streaming platform: Design high-throughput, low-latency solutions that power mission-critical messaging, personalization, and data integration use cases across Attentive’s ecosystem
- Enhance self-service for product engineering and data teams: Build and refine self-serve tools for event observability, debugging, load testing, and system configuration, empowering teams to experiment 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: Improve event delivery reliability, cost efficiency, and system integration for real-time and batch workloads
- 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
- 5+ years experience architecting and supporting high-throughput, distributed systems at scale—especially those involving event streaming or messaging platforms
- Deep understanding of the internals of distributed streaming frameworks such as Kafka, Flink, Pulsar, and/or Spark
- Proficient in Java (Spring Boot) and familiar with modern development practices, including object-oriented design, data structures, and algorithms
- Able to debug issues across the stack—from message serialization and event schemas to network and JVM tuning—and communicate tradeoffs clearly
- 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
- Track record of modernizing platforms: sunsetting legacy systems, moving to managed services, or implementing self-service capabilities
- Excited by new technologies, but pragmatic about introducing them—focused on solving real business problems
What We Use
- Our infrastructure runs primarily in Kubernetes hosted in AWS’s EKS
- Infrastructure tooling includes Istio, Datadog, Terraform, CloudFlare, and Helm
- Our backend is Java / Spring Boot microservices, built with Gradle, coupled with things like DynamoDB, AirFlow, Postgres, and Redis, hosted via AWS
- Our frontend is built with React and TypeScript, and uses best practices like GraphQL, Storybook, Radix UI, Vite, esbuild, and Playwright
- Our automation is driven by custom and open source machine learning models, lots of data and built with Python, Metaflow, HuggingFace 🤗, PyTorch, TensorFlow, and Pandas
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 $150,000-$210,000 annually + equity + benefits
- Our salary ranges are determined by role, level and location
#LI-AB2
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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.
Attentive San Francisco, California, USA Office
114 Sansome Street, San Francisco, CA, United States, 94104
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