Staff Software Engineer

United States · San Francisco · USD 160,000-210,000 · 10+ years experience · Posted Sep 28, 2026

At a glance

The Staff Software Engineer will provide technical leadership for the Flow team's end-to-end data path, including migration engines, CDC pipelines, and Helios integration.
This is a hands-on individual contributor role responsible for owning major architectural decisions and leading release-defining initiatives for enterprise data migration products.

Set technical direction for migration engines, CDC pipelines, schema evolution, and agent-assisted migration workflows.
Lead the design and delivery of large, complex, release-defining projects from problem definition through production rollout.
Make pragmatic architecture and build-versus-defer decisions balancing customer value, reliability, and performance.
Design and implement production-quality software while remaining hands-on in the codebase.
Solve complex problems involving data consistency, replication, schema drift, throughput, and concurrency.
Establish high standards for technical design, code quality, testing, observability, and operational readiness.
Drive root-cause analysis for customer-impacting issues to ensure durable fixes and improved diagnostics.
Improve production operations through runbooks, dashboards, and shared ownership of service health.
Partner with Product Management, Engineering, and Support to translate migration requirements into technical solutions.
Mentor engineers, lead design and code reviews, and develop the next generation of technical leaders.

10+ years of professional experience building and operating production software, or equivalent depth of impact.
Expert-level experience with Java, including debugging and improving complex enterprise-grade codebases.
Experience using JDBC with databases, including working with SQL metadata, datatypes, and serialization technologies like Avro or Protocol Buffers.
Strong understanding of databases and data-intensive systems, including transactions, replication, indexing, and consistency.
Deep experience with MySQL and PostgreSQL.
Experience with Java performance engineering, including concurrency, thread pools, garbage collection, and memory management.
Hands-on experience with Change Data Capture (CDC) or comparable streaming and replication technologies.
Demonstrated experience designing reliable, scalable distributed systems.
Experience with cloud-native services and container orchestration, preferably Kubernetes.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills.

Experience with Oracle, SQL Server, MongoDB, SAP HANA, Snowflake, Salesforce, or SingleStore.
Experience with schema evolution, schema-drift detection, datatype mapping, or zero-downtime data movement.
Experience building APIs or full-stack surfaces using Go, TypeScript, React, GraphQL, or gRPC.
Experience building agentic applications or systems using LLMs for operational tasks.
Experience working directly with enterprise customers on complex data or infrastructure problems.

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