Staff Software Engineer

Join our team as a Staff Software Engineer, where you will provide technical leadership for Flow's end-to-end data path. This hands-on role involves making major architectural decisions, solving complex reliability and data-consistency problems, and helping the team build durable systems. You will set the technical direction for significant areas of Flow, lead the design and delivery of large projects, and establish a high bar for technical design and code quality. Additionally, you will mentor engineers, create clear technical documentation, and advance AI-native development practices.

• Provide technical leadership for Flow’s end-to-end data path, including major architectural decisions and release-defining initiatives.
• Lead the design and delivery of large, complex projects, making pragmatic architecture and build-versus-defer decisions.
• Mentor engineers, lead design and code reviews, and help develop the next generation of technical leaders.

• The ideal candidate is a systems-minded engineer who enjoys working across product boundaries, can move comfortably between architecture and implementation, and knows how to turn difficult customer problems into scalable product improvements
• Experience with Java performance engineering, including concurrency, thread pools, garbage collection, memory pressure, or back-pressure
• Demonstrated experience designing reliable, scalable distributed systems where correctness, performance, and availability matter
• Experience investigating production issues, writing root-cause analyses, and converting operational learnings into engineering improvements
• Strong understanding of databases and data-intensive systems, including transactions, replication, indexing, connection management, and data consistency
• Strong testing discipline, including unit, integration, end-to-end, regression, performance, and failure-mode testing
• Experience with observability, profiling, metrics, distributed tracing, and production dashboards
• Bachelor’s or Master’s (preferred) degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
• Hands-on experience with Change Data Capture or comparable streaming and replication technologies, such as database logs, logical replication, change tracking, checkpoints, or offsets
• Significant professional experience building and operating production software, typically 10+ years, or equivalent depth of experience and impact
• Deep experience with MySQL and PostgreSQL
• Expert-level experience with Java including the ability to debug and improve complex, long-lived enterprise-grade codebases
• Track record of leading large technical initiatives and making architecture decisions across team or functional-area boundaries
• Experience using JDBC with one or more databases, including working with SQL metadata, SQL datatypes, schema information, database-specific behavior, connection pooling, SQL execution, Apache Avro, Protocol Buffers, or similar serialization and integration technologies
• Experience with cloud-native services and container orchestration, preferably Kubernetes
• Demonstrated ability to mentor engineers and influence outcomes without relying on formal authority
• Excellent written and verbal communication, with the ability to explain complex technical decisions to engineers, product partners, and customer-facing teams
• Additional experience with one or more of Oracle, SQL Server, MongoDB, SAP HANA, Snowflake, Salesforce, or SingleStore
• Experience with schema evolution, schema-drift detection, datatype mapping, large-table migration, table slicing, throughput tuning, or zero-downtime data movement
• Experience building APIs or full-stack product surfaces using Go, TypeScript, React, GraphQL, gRPC, or Kubernetes-native services
• Experience building agentic applications, AI-assisted developer workflows, or systems that use LLMs to plan, diagnose, or automate operational tasks
• Experience working directly with enterprise customers or customer-facing engineering teams on complex data or infrastructure problems