Senior Software Engineer (Distributed Systems)

We are Rokt, a hyper-growth ecommerce leader. Rokt is the global leader in ecommerce, unlocking real-time relevance in the moment that matters most. Rokt’s AI Brain and ecommerce Network powers billions of transactions connecting hundreds of millions of customers, and is trusted to do this by the world’s leading companies.

We are a team of builders helping smart businesses find innovative ways to meet customer needs and generate incremental revenue. Leading companies drive 10-50% of additional revenue—and often all their profits—from the extra products or services they sell. This economic edge unleashes a world of possibilities for growth and innovation.

The Rokt engineering team builds best-in-class ecommerce technology that provides personalized and relevant experiences for customers globally and empowers marketers with sophisticated, AI-driven tooling to understand consumers better. Our bespoke platform handles millions of transactions per day. It considers billions of data points which give engineers the opportunity to build technology at scale, collaborate across teams, and gain exposure to a wide range of technology.

At Rokt, we practice transparency in career paths and compensation. At Rokt, we believe in transparency, which is why we have a well-defined career ladder with transparent compensation and clear career paths based on competency and ability. Rokt’stars constantly strive to raise the bar, pushing the envelope of what is possible.

We are looking for a Staff Software Engineer (Distributed Systems)

Target total compensation of $300,000 - $515,000, including a fixed annual salary of $200,000 - $315,000, an employee equity plan grant, and world-class benefits.

Equity grants are issued in good faith, subject to company policies, board approval, and individual eligibility.

We are looking for a Software Engineer with deep experience in distributed systems to join our team in New York City. You will architect, build, and scale backend services that power critical systems across Rokts ecommerce platform. You’ll work on systems that demand low latency, high throughput, and rock-solid reliability—while leveraging AI tools to accelerate development, improve resilience, and increase autonomy.

As an engineer, you will drive projects from design through delivery, mentoring others and contributing to our engineering best practices. You’ll partner cross-functionally with Product, ML, and SRE to ensure performance and scalability as Rokt continues to scale globally.

What You’ll Do

• Design and implement distributed systems and backend APIs that scale to billions of transactions per year.
• Own architectural decisions and contribute to system design reviews and incident root cause analyses.
• Drive performance optimizations and refactors to improve system reliability, latency, and cost.
• Leverage AI/ML frameworks and tools (e.g. GitHub Copilot, Datadog AI, etc.) to speed up delivery and reduce toil.
• Mentor junior engineers and set technical direction for the team on scalability and observability best practices.
• Collaborate with cross-functional stakeholders to align engineering delivery with business objectives.

• At least 5 years of experience building production-grade distributed systems at scale.
• Proficiency in Go, Java, or similar backend languages, and strong understanding of concurrency, data structures, and algorithms.
• Experience designing APIs
• Strong command of system observability, incident response, and fault-tolerant architectures.
• Familiarity with cloud-native stacks (AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform) and CI/CD tooling.
• Effective communicator and mentor; able to lead discussions and influence design decisions.
• Excited by Rokt’s AI-first culture, and eager to raise the bar across architecture, delivery, and engineering culture.