Vice President (Identity) , Engineering

Zeta Global is an AI-Powered Marketing Cloud that leverages advanced artificial intelligence to enhance customer acquisition and retention. The Head of Identity & Data Platform will lead a large engineering team to evolve critical systems for identity resolution and data management, ensuring seamless integration across the company's platform.

Responsibilities:

• Own and define the strategic roadmap for the Identity & Data Layer, covering the full lifecycle (ingest → resolve → enrich → activate), with clear accountability for scalability, accuracy, latency, and reliability SLAs
• Lead and inspire a team of ~50 engineers
• Own the evolution of identity resolution and identity graph systems, advancing deterministic and probabilistic matching, cross-channel identity, and real-time enrichment as core competitive capabilities
• Drive the evolution
• Collaborate cross-functionally with AI, marketing, and product teams to ensure seamless integration of identity services across Zeta’s platform
• Establish the data layer as the context engine for Zeta’s AI-native platform, enabling real-time features, embeddings, and data access for models, agents, and downstream applications
• Benchmark against industry leaders and innovate ahead of the market in identity solutions
• Ensure compliance with privacy and data governance standards (e.g., CCPA, GDPR)
• Recruit, mentor, and develop top talent, while creating a strong succession plan for critical roles
• Partner with executive leadership on strategy, investment, and prioritization, aligning platform evolution with business outcomes and long-term scalability
• Collaborate with DevEx and AI Enablement teams to drive adoption of AI-native engineering practices across the data layer, improving developer productivity, code quality, and system evolution velocity

Requirements:

• 12+ years of engineering leadership, including significant time leading large-scale identity or data platforms
• Deep domain expertise in identity resolution, identity graphs, and data enrichment—preferably with experience from a top competitor or parallel industry
• Understand applicability, pros & cons & effectiveness of data engineering design patterns & concepts such as Data Lakehouse, Data Table Format, Zero-Copy Data Sharing, Cleanroom, Real-Time vs Batch Data Processing, High throughput distributed system APIs
• Possess experience working on data technologies equivalent to: Snowflake, Redshift, BigQuery, Iceberg, Hudi, Delta, EMR, Airflow, Spark, Aerospike, Scylla, DynamoDB
• Proven experience managing 50+ person organizations, including directors and senior engineering managers
• Strong understanding of data governance, privacy, and compliance, including global standards such as GDPR and CCPA
• Track record of innovation and driving measurable outcomes, including AI-driven or data-driven product capabilities
• Exceptional communication skills