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.

This hybrid role is based in our New York office, with in-office collaboration Tuesday through Thursday each week.

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