Staff Engineer

Optimove is a global marketing tech company, recognized as a Leader by Forrester and a Challenger by Gartner. We work with some of the world's most exciting brands, such as Sephora, Staples, and Entain, who love our thought-provoking combination of art and science. With a strong product, a proven business, and the DNA of a vibrant, fast-growing startup, we're on the cusp of our next growth spurt. It's the perfect time to join our team of ~500 thinkers and doers across NYC, LDN, TLV, and other locations, where 2 of every 3 managers were promoted from within. Growing your career with Optimove is basically guaranteed. 

The Campaign-Orchestration group at Optimove is responsible for the reliable, scalable, and timely delivery of billions of personalized messages and campaigns across multiple channels (email, SMS, push, web, and more). As a Staff Engineer, you will be the technical lead and driving force behind the group's most complex initiatives. You will work closely with engineers, tech leads, architects, and product managers to solve high-scale distributed systems challenges, improve performance, and design robust, future-proof systems.
This role is ideal for experienced software architects and senior developers who are passionate about system architecture, performance at scale, and leading cross-team engineering efforts without formal management duties.

Key Responsibilities

• Act as the technical authority for large-scale backend systems within the Execution group.
• Gain deep understanding of the Orchestration group's services, the campaign targeting flow, and how the Optimove product works as a whole, in order to make architectural decisions in the broader product context.
• Champion the group's strategic adoption of AI and Vibe Coding practices, becoming a key enabler for increasing developer efficiency through the use of cutting-edge AI development tools.
• Lead the design and implementation of distributed, high-throughput, low-latency services that support billions of message executions monthly.
• Partner with Engineering Managers and Architects to shape the group's long-term technical vision and architecture roadmap.
• Define and enforce engineering standards and best practices across services.
• Conduct in-depth design and code reviews, mentoring other engineers and elevating technical excellence.
• Proactively identify cross-cutting concerns and drive group-wide engineering initiatives (e.g., observability, resiliency, fault tolerance).
• Analyze and improve system bottlenecks in data flow, message queuing, storage, and processing pipelines.
• Take ownership of non-functional requirements such as reliability, scalability, maintainability, and security.
• Collaborate with Product and Data Science teams to ensure engineering plans align with business priorities.

Technical Skills and Experience

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 3 years in senior or staff-level roles involving architectural decision-making.
• Proven experience designing and building scalable, distributed systems and services in .NET/C# (preferred) or other modern languages (Java, Go, etc.).
• Expertise in designing event-driven architectures using Kafka or equivalent messaging systems.
• Deep understanding of data pipelines, message queues, batch and stream processing at scale.
• Strong experience with cloud-native development, container orchestration, and infrastructure-as-code (e.g., GCP, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform).
• Experience with relational and NoSQL databases and an understanding of their tradeoffs.
• Strong familiarity with performance monitoring, alerting, and observability tools.
• Experience driving technical design documents, evaluating new technologies, and communicating decisions effectively to varied audiences.
• Curiosity and hands-on experience with AI-powered development workflows, LLM tools, and productivity boosters is a strong plus.

Leadership & Impact

• Recognized as a go-to expert and trusted advisor by engineers across the group.
• Strong mentoring skills-willing and able to guide others through design challenges and deep technical problems.
• Comfortable operating in ambiguity, proposing solutions, and reducing complexity.
• Influences architecture, priorities, and processes beyond their immediate team.
• Passionate about creating a culture of engineering excellence, ownership, and continuous improvement.
• Leads cross-functional technical initiatives that span multiple teams and disciplines.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in a high-growth SaaS company or one with high-throughput systems.
• Background in campaign orchestration, marketing automation, or messaging systems.
• Experience working with data engineering tools and pipelines (e.g., Airflow, BigQuery, dbt) is a plus.
• Contributor to open-source or internal developer communities.
• Prior collaboration with product managers and data teams in complex domains.

Why Optimove?
Optimove is the science-first relationship marketing hub, used by the world's leading brands to understand customer behavior and drive measurable growth through personalization. We operate at the intersection of data, marketing, and engineering- and we build systems that process billions of daily events to deliver timely, relevant, and personal customer experiences.
In the Execution group, you'll work on core infrastructure that powers these interactions at scale, taking on technical challenges that have direct business impact.

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