Engineering Manager, Streaming

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

Attentive’s streaming platform is the backbone of our real-time messaging and personalization ecosystem, powering billions of events and processing millions of messages per second. It enables teams across the company to build responsive, data-driven products at massive scale.

We’re looking for an Engineering Manager to lead the Streaming Platform team, responsible for evolving and operating the core infrastructure that powers event ingestion, processing, and delivery across Attentive. In this role, you will combine strong technical leadership with people management to drive the next generation of our streaming architecture balancing reliability, scalability, and developer productivity.

You’ll work at the intersection of infrastructure, data, and product engineering, partnering closely with teams across the organization to ensure our streaming platform unlocks innovation in personalization, experimentation, and growth.

This is a high-impact role for a leader who thrives on scaling distributed systems and building high-performing teams in a fast-moving environment.

What You’ll Accomplish

Technical & Platform Leadership

• Define and drive the technical vision and roadmap for Attentive’s streaming platform (Kafka, Pulsar, Flink, etc.), aligning with company-wide goals.
• Evolve the streaming platform to support AI/agent-driven workloads, including real-time feature pipelines, low-latency inference, event replay, and closed-loop feedback systems for continuous learning and decisioning.
• Partner with ML and data teams to define standards and primitives (data contracts, observability, consistency) that enable reliable integration between streaming systems and AI agents while maintaining scalability, debuggability, and platform simplicity.
• Oversee the design and evolution of high-throughput, low-latency, and cost-efficient streaming systems that power mission-critical use cases.

Team Leadership & Execution

• Build, mentor, and lead a high-performing team of engineers, fostering a culture of ownership, collaboration, and continuous improvement.
• Balance hands-on technical involvement with people leadership, providing guidance on architecture, design, and execution.
• Drive effective planning, prioritization, and delivery across multiple initiatives while maintaining high standards for quality and reliability.

Developer Experience & Platform Adoption

• Champion improvements to the streaming developer experience, including tooling for observability, debugging, testing, and configuration.
• Enable product and data teams to move faster by building self-service capabilities and paved paths, while supporting advanced use cases for power users.
• Promote best practices in event design, schema management, and system usage across the organization.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Partner with product, data, infrastructure, and ML teams to deliver scalable, real-time solutions for customer-facing features.
• Act as a bridge between platform and application teams, ensuring alignment on priorities, tradeoffs, and system capabilities.
• Influence broader engineering strategy around real-time systems, data infrastructure, and platform architecture.

Operational Excellence

• Ensure high standards for reliability, observability, and incident response across the streaming ecosystem.
• Drive improvements in system performance, cost efficiency, and scalability.
• Establish and maintain best practices for monitoring, alerting, and debugging distributed systems at scale.

Your Expertise

• 9+ years of experience in software engineering, with 2+ years in engineering management or technical leadership roles.
• Strong background in distributed systems and high-throughput data infrastructure, particularly event streaming or messaging systems.
• Experience with technologies such as Kafka, Pulsar, Flink, Spark, or Kinesis, and a deep understanding of their tradeoffs and operating models.
• Proven ability to lead complex platform or infrastructure initiatives spanning multiple teams.
• Solid backend engineering skills (preferably Java/Spring Boot) with the ability to engage in technical design and code reviews.
• Experience building and operating systems with a focus on scalability, reliability, and debuggability.
• Familiarity with cloud-native infrastructure (AWS, Kubernetes/EKS) and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Helm).
• Strong understanding of observability practices (metrics, tracing, logging) in distributed systems.
• Demonstrated ability to hire, mentor, and grow engineers, and foster an inclusive, high-performance culture.
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to clearly articulate technical tradeoffs and influence stakeholders.

What We Use

• Event Streaming: Apache Kafka, Pulsar, Flink
• Cloud Infrastructure: AWS (EKS/Kubernetes), Terraform, Helm, Istio, CloudFlare
• Backend: Java, Spring Boot, Gradle, DynamoDB, Postgres, Redis
• Observability: Datadog, distributed tracing, custom tooling
• Data & Automation: Python, Airflow, and integrations with ML/analytics systems
• Frontend (for tooling): React, TypeScript, GraphQL

Why This Role

• Own and shape the core real-time platform that powers Attentive’s entire product ecosystem
• Lead a team working on systems at massive scale (billions of events, millions/sec throughput)
• Influence company-wide architecture and unlock new capabilities in personalization and experimentation
• Grow as a leader while staying close to deep technical challenges in distributed systems

You'll get competitive perks and benefits, from health & wellness to equity, to help you bring your best self to work.

For US based applicants:

• The US base salary range for this full-time position is $210,000 - $265,000 annually + equity + benefits
• Our salary ranges are determined by role, level and location

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Attentive Company Values Default to Action - Move swiftly and with purpose Be One Unstoppable Team - Rally as each other’s champions Champion the Customer - Our success is defined by our customers' success Act Like an Owner - Take responsibility for Attentive’s success Learn more about AWAKE, Attentive’s collective of employee resource groups. If you do not meet all the requirements listed here, we still encourage you to apply! No job description is perfect, and we may also have another opportunity that closely matches your skills and experience. At Attentive, we know that our Company's strength lies in the diversity of our employees. Attentive is an Equal Opportunity Employer and we welcome applicants from all backgrounds. Our policy is to provide equal employment opportunities for all employees, applicants and covered individuals regardless of protected characteristics. We prioritize and maintain a fair, inclusive and equitable workplace free from discrimination, harassment, and retaliation. Attentive is also committed to providing reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities. If you need any assistance or reasonable accommodations, please let your recruiter know.