Staff Software Engineer (Product Data Platform)

• This opportunity is on our Product Data Platform (PDP) team, which builds and operates the high-performance data, query, and search infrastructure that powers critical Brex product experiences, including AI-powered data products like our agentic reporting experience
• PDP’s mission is to make Brex customizable, scalable, and reliable for finance teams, and that requires deeply optimized, production-grade distributed systems
• As a Staff Software Engineer, you’ll shape the technical direction of the platform across multiple teams. Your mandate is to identify the highest-impact architectural problems across the data products group, including the cross-cutting ones that fall between teams, and drive them to resolution
• You’ll be accountable for the group’s technical quality, move between long-horizon strategy and hands-on execution, and lead through influence rather than authority
• 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)

Benefits

• Medical, dental & vision
• Generous vacation
• Spring Health & Calm
• Year-end company shutdown
• Milk Stork for nursing parents
• In-office days, lunches & offsites
• Commuter benefits
• 4 fully remote weeks
• Carrot Fertility benefits
• Generous parental leave

• 8+ years of backend engineering experience building and operating production systems at scale, including as a technical leader on multi-team initiatives
• Experience mentoring senior engineers
• Strong written and verbal communication, with the ability to influence stakeholders and align teams without direct authority
• 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
• Track record of leading architecture and delivery for large-scale distributed systems in a platform or infrastructure environment
• 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