Sr AI/ML Engineer

As a Senior AI/ML Engineer in our AdTech team, you will be a hands-on individual contributor building and deploying machine learning models and AI-driven features for our advertising platform. You will partner with engineering, product, and data science to deliver production-grade ML for campaign optimization, user personalization, and creative intelligence—operating at large scale and low latency across billions of ad events per day. You will contribute to modern ML/LLM capabilities and agentic workflows that automate and enhance campaign operations, with a strong focus on reliability, performance, and measurable business impact.

Key Responsibilities

• Machine Learning Delivery: Design, implement, and ship scalable ML solutions for core AdTech use cases (targeting, ranking, pacing, measurement). Own features end-to-end from experimentation to production rollout.
• ML System Design: Build and evolve the ML lifecycle—data preparation, training, evaluation, and real-time inference—ensuring models integrate cleanly with ad serving systems and meet low-latency, high-throughput requirements.
• Technical Contribution: Contribute to the AI/ML technical roadmap by evaluating tools and techniques (including deep learning, LLMs, and retrieval/feature systems). Make pragmatic trade-offs with an eye toward maintainability and operational excellence.
• AI & Agentic Applications: Develop and integrate LLM-powered features and agentic workflows that assist with campaign workflows such as audience insights, bid/budget recommendations, and creative generation—within well-defined guardrails.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work closely with engineering, product, and data science partners to translate marketing objectives into ML-driven solutions, define success metrics, and deliver iterative improvements.
• Performance & Reliability: Operate ML services in a high-concurrency, latency-sensitive environment. Optimize inference paths, implement monitoring/alerting, manage model drift, and ensure safe deployment practices (A/B testing, canaries, rollbacks).
• Mentorship & Best Practices: Mentor and support other engineers through code/model reviews and knowledge sharing. Champion engineering rigor in testing, observability, documentation, and reproducible ML workflows.

Required Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in software engineering and/or applied machine learning, with a track record of shipping ML systems to production.
• Experience designing and building high-throughput, low-latency services or data pipelines for large-scale applications.
• Working knowledge of the programmatic advertising ecosystem (DSP/SSP/RTB) is a plus; strong adjacent experience (recommendation, ranking, marketplaces) is also valued.
• Proficiency in at least one of Java, Go, or Python for backend services and ML tooling.
• Hands-on experience with ML frameworks (PyTorch or TensorFlow) and common modeling approaches (classification, ranking, embeddings, deep learning).
• Experience with big data and streaming frameworks (e.g., Spark, Kafka) for processing and analyzing large datasets.
• Experience deploying ML to cloud environments (preferably AWS) and operating services at scale.
• Familiarity with data stores (SQL/NoSQL) such as PostgreSQL/MySQL, Cassandra/DynamoDB, Redis, etc.
• Familiarity with containerization/orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes) and CI/CD practices.
• Strong communication skills and ability to collaborate across disciplines; comfort explaining technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with Large Language Models (LLMs) and generative AI applied to advertising (e.g., ad copy generation, creative optimization, or personalized messaging).
• Experience designing and implementing agentic workflows that support autonomous or semi-autonomous decision-making with strong safety/observability guardrails.
• Experience with model serving and optimization for real-time inference (latency-critical environments).
• Familiarity with modern data lake and table formats (e.g., Apache Iceberg, Apache Hudi) for managing large-scale analytical datasets.
• Knowledge of microservices architecture and event-driven design patterns in distributed systems.
• Contributions to open-source projects, publications, or speaking engagements that demonstrate thought leadership in AI/ML are a plus.

WHO WE ARE

Zeta Global (NYSE: ZETA) is the AI-Powered Marketing Cloud that leverages advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and trillions of consumer signals to make it easier for marketers to acquire, grow, and retain customers more efficiently. Through the Zeta Marketing Platform (ZMP), our vision is to make sophisticated marketing simple by unifying identity, intelligence, and omnichannel activation into a single platform – powered by one of the industry’s largest proprietary databases and AI. Our enterprise customers across multiple verticals are empowered to personalize experiences with consumers at an individual level across every channel, delivering better results for marketing programs.

Zeta was founded in 2007 by David A. Steinberg and John Sculley and is headquartered in New York City with offices around the world. To learn more, go to www.zetaglobal.com.