Staff Software Engineer, Product Data Platform

The shape of it

In the posting’s own words

This role will be based in our Seattle Office. We are a hybrid environment that combines the energy and connections of being in the office with the benefits and flexibility of working from home. We currently require a minimum of three coordinated days in the office per week, Monday, Wednesday and Thursday.

What it asks for · 6

• 8+ years of backend engineering experience building and operating production systems at scale, including as a technical leader on multi-team initiatives.
• 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 strongly preferred), including query plan analysis, indexing strategies, and real-world optimization.
• Ability to drive ambiguous, cross-cutting problems to resolution without a defined charter.
• Strong written and verbal communication, with the ability to influence stakeholders and align teams without direct authority.
• Experience mentoring senior engineers.

Also a plus

• Hands-on experience with OpenSearch / Elasticsearch or similar systems in production.
• Experience with streaming data platforms (Flink, Kafka) or semantic/analytics layers in production.
• Experience with multi-tenant or data-heavy platforms in regulated environments.
• Experience building platform foundations for AI or agentic product experiences.

What the job covers

• 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 no single team can own.
• Own architecture direction for query performance: query plans, execution paths, cost models, indexing strategies, and schema and access-pattern design.
• Design and evolve distributed systems with thoughtful tradeoffs around consistency, latency, caching, cost, and failure modes.
• Raise the technical bar across the group through design reviews and architecture decisions, and dive in hands-on where it matters most, including P95/P99 latency issues in production.
• Proactively identify scaling risks and reliability gaps, and turn findings into plans the group aligns behind.
• Mentor senior engineers and grow the next generation of technical leaders within PDP.
• Contribute directly on high-stakes initiatives and critical path decisions, primarily in the JVM ecosystem (Kotlin/Java).

Tools and skills named

Words the posting leans on

• experience9×
• technical7×
• data6×
• platform6×
• systems6×
• architecture5×
• product5×
• engineering4×
• group4×
• hands-on4×
• pdp4×
• problems4×
• production4×
• query4×
• critical3×
• design3×

Counted from the posting after the mission statement and the legal notices are set aside. The ones near the top are the ones a screener is looking for.

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