Staff Software Engineer, Product Data Platform
$240k - $300k • San Francisco, California, United States
Posted 2mo ago
Job Location
San Francisco, California, United States
Tech Stack
Remote Work Policy
On-site
Categories
Applied AI Engineer
About the job
Brex is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to join their Product Data Platform (PDP) team. This role will focus on building and operating high-performance data, query, and search infrastructure that supports critical Brex product experiences, including AI-powered features. The PDP team's mission is to enhance Brex's customizability, scalability, and reliability for finance teams through deeply optimized, production-grade distributed systems. As a Staff Software Engineer, you will be instrumental in shaping the technical direction of the platform across multiple teams, identifying and resolving high-impact architectural challenges, and driving them to completion. You will be responsible for the group's technical quality, bridging long-term strategy with hands-on execution, and leading through influence.
Responsibilities
- Lead technical strategy for critical PDP initiatives, balancing long-term architecture with near-term delivery across multiple teams.
- Identify and resolve systemic performance, consistency, and scalability problems, including cross-team gaps.
- Own architecture direction for query performance, including query plans, execution paths, cost models, indexing strategies, and schema/access-pattern design.
- Design and evolve distributed systems with thoughtful tradeoffs around consistency, latency, caching, cost, and failure modes.
- Raise the technical bar through design reviews and architecture decisions, and contribute hands-on to critical issues like P95/P99 latency.
- Proactively identify scaling risks and reliability gaps, and develop actionable plans.
- Mentor senior engineers and foster technical leadership within PDP.
- Contribute directly to high-stakes initiatives and critical path decisions, primarily in the JVM ecosystem (Kotlin/Java).
Requirements
- 8+ years of backend engineering experience building and operating production systems at scale, including technical leadership on multi-team initiatives.
- Proven track record of leading architecture and delivery for large-scale distributed systems in a platform or infrastructure environment.
- Deep hands-on expertise with relational databases (Postgres or Aurora preferred), including query plan analysis, indexing strategies, and optimization.
- Ability to drive ambiguous, cross-cutting problems to resolution without a defined charter.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to influence stakeholders and align teams without direct authority.
- Experience mentoring senior engineers.
Benefits
- Up to four weeks per year of fully remote work.