Lead Developer Experience Engineer

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.

Lead Developer Experience Engineer

We are seeking a hands-on, highly driven Lead Developer Experience Engineer to design, build, and continuously improve the internal platform, tooling, and practices that empower our developers to succeed. Anchored in Developer Experience yet focused on the platform layer, this role sits at the intersection of development, DevOps, and infrastructure and exists to remove friction in how engineers interact with partner groups (e.g., Release Engineering, SRE/Infrastructure, Security) through clear processes and guidelines. You will lead the charter of our internal developer platform and experience, owning the roadmap, establishing core capabilities (CI/CD, build/test, local dev, environments), and driving measurable productivity gains across the company.

This role requires a doer with a proven track record of delivering impact in medium to large-scale engineering organizations, someone who thrives at the intersection of development, DevOps, and infrastructure. You will be lead the charter of developer experience, and raise the bar for developer productivity across the engineering org.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain local and remote developer environments that are fast, reliable, and consistent.

• Maintain and optimize CI/CD pipelines for speed, reliability, and cost-efficiency.

• Streamline developer workflows to reduce friction and enable rapid, safe delivery of features.

• Build, maintain, and evolve testing environments and frameworks.

• Own the end-to-end developer onboarding flow, ensuring engineers can be productive from day one.

• Proactively analyze, debug, and resolve complex environment issues across build systems, infrastructure, and tooling.

• Champion metrics and observability around developer productivity (build times, test times, CI/CD stability, onboarding duration, etc.) and continuously drive improvements.

• Collaborate closely with developers, QA, SRE, and DevOps teams to identify pain points and implement scalable solutions.

• Advocate for best practices in code quality, testing, and deployment as part of the developer experience charter.• Introduce AI-powered enhancements where they provide clear productivity gains, such as intelligent testing, onboarding automation, or assisted code reviews.

Qualifications

• Proven experience improving developer productivity in medium to large engineering organizations.

• Strong expertise with macOS and Linux development environments.

• Proficiency in Bash, Python, and TypeScript; familiarity with Go or Java is a plus.

• Solid experience with containers (Docker, Kubernetes/EKS) and build optimization techniques.

• Familiarity with build systems and dependency management tools (pnpm, npm, pip).

• Experience with testing frameworks and environments (pytest, Jest/Vitest, JUnit/Testcontainers, etc.).

• Familiarity with linting and static analysis tools (SonarQube, SpotBugs, Checkstyle, ESLint, Flake8).

• Strong knowledge of CI/CD platforms (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, or CircleCI) and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform).

• Demonstrated experience leveraging frameworks like DORA (lead time, deployment frequency, MTTR, change failure rate) and SPACE (satisfaction, performance, activity, communication, efficiency) to measure and improve developer experience.

• Design and support progressive delivery workflows (feature flags, canary releases, blue/green deploys) and ensure rollback strategies are seamlessly integrated into developer pipelines.

• Excellent debugging, troubleshooting, and problem-solving skills across complex systems.

• Strong collaboration and communication skills, with the ability to influence and drive change across teams.

• A hands-on builder mindset—willing to roll up your sleeves, experiment, and deliver results independently.

Bonus Skills

• Exposure to cloud platforms (AWS) and developer tooling ecosystems.

• Contributions to open-source developer tooling or productivity frameworks.• Knowledge of developer onboarding automation and self-service tooling.

BENEFITS & PERKS

• Unlimited PTO
• Excellent medical, dental, and vision coverage
• Employee Equity
• Employee Discounts, Virtual Wellness Classes, and Pet Insurance And more!!

SALARY RANGE

The salary range for this role is $150,000 - $200,000, depending on location and experience. 

PEOPLE & CULTURE AT ZETA

Zeta considers applicants for employment without regard to, and does not discriminate on the basis of an individual’s sex, race, color, religion, age, disability, status as a veteran, or national or ethnic origin; nor does Zeta discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity or expression.  

We’re committed to building a workplace culture of trust and belonging, so everyone feels invited to bring their whole selves to work. We provide a forum for employees to celebrate, support and advocate for one another. Learn more about our commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion here:  https://zetaglobal.com/blog/a-look-into-zetas-ergs/ 

ZETA IN THE NEWS!

https://zetaglobal.com/press/?cat=press-releases 

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