Lead Software Engineer – Event Processing Platform

At Branch, we’re transforming how brands and users interact across digital platforms. Our mobile marketing and deep linking solutions are trusted to deliver seamless experiences that increase ROI, decrease wasted spend, and eliminate siloed attribution. Our Branch team consists of smart, humble, and collaborative people who value ownership over all. Everything we do is centered around creating a great product, team, and company that lives and breathes our motto:
Build Together, Grow Together, Win Together.

Branch’s event processing Platform enables Branch’s Matching & Attribution, Identity graph, and Attribution.

• Own the paved road:
  Define and evolve the common libraries, patterns, and contracts (Protobuf/Avro, gRPC/HTTP) used by sdk, gateway, matching, attribution, and identity services.
• Schema evolution at scale:
  Lead contract-as-code strategy (compatibility rules, registry, linting), zero/low-downtime rollouts, backfill/replay plans, and migration tooling.
• Throughput & latency:
  Design and tune Kafka topologies (partitions, compaction, tiered storage), producer/consumer settings, batching/compression, and hot-path code to hit p95/p99 targets.
• State & storage architecture:
  Model data across Aerospike/Dynamo
  
  DB/FDB (keys/range design, TTL, transactions, conflict resolution); eradicate hot keys and write amps; codify backup/restore.
• Reliability & recovery:
  Ship idempotency/effectively-once semantics, DLQs, reprocessing pipelines, multi-region readiness, chaos tests, and disaster-recovery drills (RPO/RTO goals).
• Observability & SLOs:
  Standardize Open Telemetry (traces/metrics/logs), golden signals, burn-rate alerts, and dashboards; make failure modes explainable with reason codes.
• Change safety:
  Feature flags, canary/blue-green, automated rollback, perf budgets in CI, and pre-merge contract/compat tests.
• Security & compliance by default:
  AuthN/Z between services, HMAC/signature verification at edges, PII controls, audit trails.
• Mentor & influence:
  Drive design reviews/RFCs, coach senior engineers, and partner with product teams as your customers.

• 8-10 years backend/platform experience; prior tech lead on a high-throughput, low-latency data system.
• Depth in Java,Kotlin and Go. Strong async/concurrency, profiling, and performance tuning.
• Real-world Kafka expertise (idempotent producers, EOS patterns, DLQ/replay, compaction/retention).
• Hands‑on with Aerospike and/or Dynamo
  
  DB and/or Foundation
  
  DB (data modeling, transactions, hotspots, cost tuning).
• Avro/Protobuf schema registry, backward/forward compatibility, and contract testing in CI.
• Production‑grade observability (Graphana), on‑call readiness, and incident management.
• Clear, pragmatic communication; writes crisp design docs and drives cross‑team alignment.

• Identity graphs, attribution pipelines, or similar matching systems.
• Multi‑region active/active, disaster recovery, chaos/latency injection.
• Stream processing (Flink/KStreams/Spark Structured Streaming) for enrichment/dedupe.
• Security hardening at the edge (rate limits, signatures, envelope encryption).

• Designing effectively‑once ingestion with idempotency keys across gateways and Kafka.
• Rolling out a schema change touching 10 services with no downtime and a reversible plan.
• Eliminating a hot partition by reshaping keys/partitions and back filling safely.
• Building a replayer that reprocesses N hours of data without violating ordering/SLOs.

This role will be based at our Austin, TX office and follows a Hybrid schedule that will be aligned with our Return to Office guidelines. This role does not qualify for visa sponsorship.

In accordance with applicable law, the following represents a reasonable estimated compensation range for this role: the estimated pay range for this role, if based in Austin, TX, is $169,000 – $200,000. Please note that this information is provided for those hired in Austin, TX only. Compensation for candidates outside of Austin, TX will be based on the candidate’s specific work location.

Actual compensation will be determined based on skills, experience, and geographic location and may be more or less than the…