Attentive

Principal Backend Engineer, Search & Personalization Optimization

Job Description

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 Search Platform team is the backbone of Attentive’s data infrastructure, processing, storing, and optimizing data at massive scale and speed. We handle billions of events from over 100 million customers daily, enabling near-real-time data insights and AI-driven capabilities through our Data, Optimization, and ML Platforms. Joining our team offers a high-growth career opportunity to work with some of the world’s most talented engineers in a high-performance and high-impact culture.

As a Principal Software Engineer, you will be responsible for leading the design, development, and deployment of distributed data applications and contributing towards the betterment of engineering culture at Attentive. You will partner closely with cross-functional teams to create our high-impact search platform, delivering personalized experiences for our clients and their customers. Your role will also include mentoring engineers, driving technical excellence, and contributing to strategic planning for the engineering department.  

This team is building the search platform that empowers our clients to curate audience segments, which Attentive uses across the platform to personalize content. By delivering more relevant and engaging messages, this drives higher performance for our clients and better experiences for their customers.


What You'll Accomplish
  • Lead the design and development of search and personalization platforms that optimize audience segmentation and drive client engagement
  • Collaborate with engineering, product, and design teams to ensure the delivery of high-quality, innovative solutions
  • Contribute to company-wide initiatives, including process improvements, infrastructure advancements, and system architecture that scale and support personalization at scale
  • Provide mentorship and technical leadership, promoting engineering best practices and fostering team growth
  • Simplify complex projects to ensure efficiency and reduce the workload, enabling faster and more impactful results

    • Your Expertise
  • 10+ years of experience in software engineering, with a focus on high-throughput, distributed systems
  • Strong proficiency in Java, Python, or Go, and a deep understanding of object-oriented design, algorithms, and optimization
  • Proven expertise in data modeling, segmentation, and audience targeting using relational and non-relational databases
  • Experience building and optimizing applications for personalization at scale
  • Track record of architecting and maintaining high-performance, secure, and reliable infrastructure
  • Ability to navigate ambiguous environments, turning business goals into clear, actionable plans
  • Exceptional communication skills, able to work seamlessly with both technical and non-technical stakeholders

    • Nice To Haves
  • Familiarity building segmentation platforms 0-1, AI-driven personalization systems, or marketing automation tools

    • 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, Kinesis, AirFlow, Postgres, Planetscale, 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 PlaywrightOur automation is driven by custom and open source machine learning models, lots of data and built with Python, Metaflow, HuggingFace 🤗, PyTorch, TensorFlow, and Pandas

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