---
title: 'Principal AI Engineer at Zeta Global'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/principal-ai-engineer-zeta-global-berlin-r4hnfgrdvad8'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-11-12'
---

# Principal AI Engineer at Zeta Global

- **Company:** Zeta Global
- **Location:** Berlin, Germany
- **Posted:** 2026-11-11
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-12
- **Apply:** https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/zetaglobal/jobs/6240471004

## Job description

## 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](https://www.zetaglobal.com).

## Key Responsibilities

- Technical strategy and architecture. Define the AI/ML architecture and technical roadmap across the portfolio. Identify shared capabilities, establish clear interfaces, and guide build-versus-buy decisions while respecting product-specific requirements.
- Predictive ML and optimization. Lead advances in prediction, targeting, ranking, bidding, pacing, and personalization. Guide feature development, training, calibration, and serving, addressing sparse signals, delayed outcomes, and changing data distributions.
- Agentic frameworks and agents. Design reusable orchestration, tool integration, retrieval, state and memory, and multi-agent coordination. Build workflows for campaign planning, insights, recommendations, and execution, with explicit permissions, human approval where needed, and recoverable failure handling.
- Portfolio integration. Partner with Predict, Agentic Frameworks, Email DSP/SSP, and agentic teams to connect models, data, and services through well-defined APIs and shared evaluation practices. Turn successful patterns into reusable components and practical migration paths.
- Production engineering. Own critical designs and implementations across data pipelines, training, deployment, and inference. Establish MLOps and LLMOps practices for reproducibility, versioning, automated testing, observability, and safe rollouts and rollbacks.
- Evaluation and business impact. Define offline benchmarks and online experiments tied to advertiser outcomes. Evaluate prediction quality, calibration, agent task completion, tool accuracy, latency, and cost; use A/B testing and incrementality methods where appropriate.
- Reliability and responsible AI. Set standards for service performance, drift detection, data quality, and incident response. Build privacy-aware data access, auditability, and protection against prompt injection, data leakage, and unintended agent actions.
- Technical leadership. Partner with engineering, data science, product, and business leaders to turn ambiguous needs into deliverable plans. Lead design and code reviews, mentor senior engineers, and resolve technical decisions across teams.

Required Qualifications

- 12+ years of relevant software engineering and applied ML experience, or equivalent demonstrated expertise, including substantial ownership of production ML systems and technical leadership across multiple teams.
- Deep expertise in predictive ML for ranking, recommendation, classification, or optimization, with strong foundations in statistics, experimentation, model evaluation, and the full model lifecycle.
- Hands-on experience delivering LLM applications and agentic workflows to production, including tool use, retrieval, orchestration, evaluation, guardrails, and operational monitoring.
- Proven ability to architect distributed, high-throughput, low-latency systems and make sound trade-offs across model quality, infrastructure cost, and operational complexity.
- Strong Python skills and proficiency in Java, Go, or a comparable backend language; experience with PyTorch or TensorFlow, SQL, and large-scale data or streaming systems such as Spark and Kafka.
- Experience with cloud infrastructure, preferably AWS, containerization, CI/CD, model serving, and production observability; familiarity with relational, NoSQL, caching, and retrieval systems.
- Ability to influence without direct authority, communicate architectural decisions clearly, mentor experienced engineers, and translate business objectives into measurable technical outcomes.

## Preferred Qualifications

- AdTech experience across DSPs, SSPs, real-time bidding, audience modeling, identity, attribution, or measurement; relevant experience in recommendation systems or marketplaces is also valued.
- Experience with causal inference, uplift modeling, contextual bandits, constrained optimization, or online learning in production.
- Experience with privacy-aware identity and audience systems, email advertising, or integrating ML capabilities across multiple products.
- Experience optimizing model and LLM inference, selecting and adapting models, or building reusable ML and agent platforms adopted by multiple teams.

## 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

## About Zeta Global

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Zeta Global is an AI-powered marketing cloud platform that unifies identity, intelligence, and omnichannel activation to help enterprise brands acquire, grow, and retain customers.
- **Entity Type**: Public (NYSE: ZETA)
- **Headquarters**: New York, NY, USA
- **Founded**: 2007
- **Founders**: David A. Steinberg and John Sculley (former Apple CEO and Pepsi President)

## Core Business
- Primary industry/industries: Marketing technology (MarTech), Advertising technology (AdTech), Artificial Intelligence
- Target customers: Enterprise brands and scaled enterprises (defined as customers generating at least $100,000 in trailing twelve-month revenue); over 450 such customers across diverse verticals
- Mission or purpose statement: "Accelerate Brand Growth" by enabling brands to build repeatable and scalable programs that drive higher ROI on marketing investments

## Products & Services
- **Zeta Marketing Platform (ZMP)**: The core omnichannel marketing platform that leverages proprietary AI and trillions of consumer signals. It unifies identity, intelligence, and activation into a single platform, enabling personalized experiences across email, social media, web, SMS, connected TV, video, and more.
- **Athena by Zeta™**: An agentic AI solution that puts AI at the center of every marketing decision, enabling automated workflows, spend optimization, and scaling of impact across the customer journey.
- **Data & Analytics**: A proprietary opt-in database of unique global identifiers, providing deterministic attribution, real-time intent data, and interest/intent audiences for precise targeting and measurable outcomes.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Publicly traded on NYSE; market cap fluctuates (latest data not specified in search results)
- **Key Metric**: Over 450 scaled enterprise customers; over 1,700 employees globally (as of investor relations page), with recent headcount exceeding 2,000 (as of life-at-Zeta page)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Co-founded by John Sculley (former Apple CEO); recent strategic partnership announced with Palantir (June 2026) to build unified data and AI infrastructure for marketing
- **Growth Signals**: Strategic partnership with Palantir; launch of Athena by Zeta™ for agencies; consistent expansion of enterprise customer base; global office presence across 12+ locations

## Competitive Advantages
- **Proprietary Identity Data**: One of the industry’s largest proprietary opt-in databases, providing a unique foundation for deterministic attribution and real-time intent targeting.
- **Unified Platform**: Combines identity, intelligence, and activation into a single platform, eliminating the need for multiple point solutions and vendor silos—directly addressing a key pain point for CMOs.
- **AI-First Approach**: Leverages advanced AI and agentic AI (Athena) to automate and optimize marketing workflows, making sophisticated marketing simple and scalable.
- **Founding Leadership**: Co-founded by a former Apple CEO, bringing deep industry credibility and strategic vision.

## Strategic Focus
- **AI and Automation**: Deepening investment in agentic AI (Athena by Zeta) to automate marketing decisions and workflows, reducing manual effort for marketers.
- **Partnership Ecosystem**: Expanding strategic partnerships (e.g., Palantir) to build unified data and AI infrastructure, opening new capabilities for enterprise clients.
- **Agency Channel**: Bringing Athena by Zeta to agencies, extending the platform’s reach beyond direct enterprise customers.
- **Global Expansion**: Maintaining and growing a global footprint with offices in the US, India, Europe, and South America to serve multinational clients.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture & Values**: Emphasizes "Achieving the Impossible™" with virtues like "Curiosity Beats Certainty," "Fearless Exploration," "Always Learning," and "Humanize." The culture is described as collaborative, innovative, and supportive of individual growth.
- **Diversity & Inclusion**: Active Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) for LGBTQIA+, women, Hispanic/Latinx, Asian & Pacific Islander, Black community, neurodiverse employees, and sustainability-focused groups.
- **Work Policy**: Offers hybrid and remote work options, with in-office events and virtual engagement. Specific policies vary by role and location.
- **Benefits**: Competitive pay equity, 401k with company match, Employee Stock Purchase Plan, flexible time off, generous parental leave, wellness programs (Caravan app, gym discounts), commuter benefits, and adoption assistance. In the US, includes medical, dental, vision, STD/LTD, life insurance. EMEA offices offer pensions, work-from-home allowances, and lunch vouchers.
- **Career Growth**: Emphasizes "Always Learning" as a core virtue, with opportunities for mentorship, cross-functional collaboration, and internal mobility. Hiring process includes a first chat with Talent, team interviews, and an onboarding program designed for connection.
- **Global Presence**: Opportunity to work in major hubs like New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Nashville, London, Paris, Prague, Hyderabad, Bangalore, and more.

## Sources
1. [Zeta Global Official Site](https://zetaglobal.com/)
2. [Zeta Global - Our Story and Mission](https://zetaglobal.com/about/our-story/)
3. [Zeta Global - Benefits and Hiring](https://zetaglobal.com/about/benefits-and-hiring/)
4. [Zeta Global - Investor Relations](https://investors.zetaglobal.com/overview/default.aspx)
5. [Zeta Global - Life at Zeta](https://zetaglobal.com/about/life-at-zeta/)
6. [Zeta Global - Careers Page (Greenhouse)](https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/zetaglobal)

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