Staff Software Engineer

United States · San Francisco · USD 160,000-210,000 · 10+ years experience · Posted Oct 8, 2026

At a glance

The Staff Software Engineer will provide technical leadership for the Flow team, which builds enterprise data migration and integration products.
This hands-on individual contributor role involves owning major architectural decisions and leading release-defining initiatives for data-intensive systems.
The role requires working across product boundaries to solve complex problems in data consistency, replication, and migration at scale.

Set technical direction for migration engines, CDC pipelines, schema evolution, and Flow APIs.
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 difficult problems involving data consistency, replication, schema drift, throughput, and concurrency.
Establish a high bar 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 help develop the next generation of technical leaders.

10+ years of professional experience building and operating production software.
Expert-level experience with Java, including debugging complex enterprise-grade codebases.
Experience using JDBC with databases, including SQL metadata, datatypes, and connection pooling.
Strong understanding of databases and data-intensive systems, including transactions, replication, and indexing.
Deep experience with MySQL and PostgreSQL.
Experience with Java performance engineering, including concurrency, thread pools, and garbage collection.
Hands-on experience with Change Data Capture or streaming and replication technologies.
Demonstrated experience designing reliable, scalable distributed systems.
Experience with cloud-native services and container orchestration, preferably Kubernetes.
Strong testing discipline including unit, integration, end-to-end, and failure-mode testing.

Experience with Oracle, SQL Server, MongoDB, SAP HANA, Snowflake, Salesforce, or SingleStore.
Experience with schema evolution, schema-drift detection, 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 automation.
Experience working directly with enterprise customers on complex data or infrastructure problems.

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