Staff Software Engineer, Product Data Platform

About the Role

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 through 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 and drive them to resolution.

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 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, diving in hands-on where it matters most (including P95/P99 latency issues in production).
• Proactively identify scaling risks and reliability gaps, turning 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).

Requirements

• 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.

Bonus

• 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.