Staff Software Engineer

Job description

### About SingleStore SingleStore delivers a real-time, distributed SQL database that unifies transactional and analytical workloads. Our engineers build cloud-native software for some of the world’s most demanding data-intensive applications, working in a fast-moving environment where teams own their work end to end and partner closely across Product and customer-facing organisations. ### About the Flow team SingleStore Flow is an enterprise data migration and integration product that helps customers move data into SingleStore reliably and at scale. The team builds the systems that support schema transfer, bulk data loading, real-time Change Data Capture (CDC), large-table migrations, and a native experience in SingleStore Helios. Flow spans Java-based engines, source and destination connectors, database internals, performance and memory management, Helios services and APIs, observability, test automation, Flow AI Agent and signed production release delivery. The product works across heterogeneous database environments, including MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, SQL Server, MongoDB, SAP HANA, Snowflake, Salesforce, and SingleStore-as-a-source. ### Position Overview We are looking for a Staff Engineer to provide technical leadership for Flow’s end-to-end data path from source systems and CDC through migration engines, APIs, Helios, and the customer experience. This is a hands-on individual contributor role with broad technical influence. You will own major architectural decisions, lead strategically important and release-defining initiatives, solve complex reliability and data-consistency problems, and help the team build durable systems that customers can trust with their most important migrations. You will remain close to the code while raising the technical bar for design, testing, observability, operational excellence, and AI-assisted engineering. 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. ### What you’ll do - Set technical direction for significant areas of Flow, including the migration engines, CDC pipeline, schema evolution, large-table migration, source-to-target data correctness, Flow APIs, Helios integration, and agent-assisted migration workflows. - Lead the design and delivery of large, complex, release-defining projects from problem definition through production rollout. - Make pragmatic architecture and build-versus-defer decisions that balance customer value, reliability, performance, maintainability, and delivery speed. - Design and implement production-quality software while remaining hands-on in the codebase. - Solve difficult, ambiguous problems involving data consistency, replication, schema drift, throughput, memory use, concurrency, failure recovery, and backward compatibility. - Establish a high bar for technical design, code quality, testing, observability, security, and operational readiness. - Drive root-cause analysis for customer-impacting issues and ensure that incidents result in durable fixes, better tests, improved diagnostics, or clearer operational safeguards. - Improve the team’s ability to operate Flow in production through runbooks, dashboards, release discipline, incident response, and shared ownership of service health. - Partner closely with Product Management, Engineering, Support, Solutions, and customers to translate real-world migration requirements into robust technical solutions. - Mentor engineers, lead design and code reviews, distribute technical context, and help develop the next generation of technical leaders. - Create clear technical documentation that makes architecture, APIs, customer journeys, trade-offs, and operational procedures understandable to the broader engineering organization. - Advance AI-native development practices and agentic capabilities that improve engineering productivity and make customer migrations more self-serve. ### Required skills and experience - Significant professional experience building and operating production software, typically 10+ years, or equivalent depth of experience and impact. - Expert-level experience with Java including the ability to debug and improve complex, long-lived enterprise-grade codebases. - 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. - Strong understanding of databases and data-intensive systems, including transactions, replication, indexing, connection management, and data consistency. - Deep experience with MySQL and PostgreSQL - Experience with Java performance engineering, including concurrency, thread pools, garbage collection, memory pressure, or back-pressure - Hands-on experience with Change Data Capture or comparable streaming and replication technologies, such as database logs, logical replication, change tracking, checkpoints, or offsets. - Demonstrated experience designing reliable, scalable distributed systems where correctness, performance, and availability matter. - Experience with cloud-native services and container orchestration, preferably Kubernetes. - Track record of leading large technical initiatives and making architecture decisions across team or functional-area boundaries. - Strong testing discipline, including unit, integration, end-to-end, regression, performance, and failure-mode testing. - Experience investigating production issues, writing root-cause analyses, and converting operational learnings into engineering improvements. - Experience with observability, profiling, metrics, distributed tracing, and production dashboards. - Excellent written and verbal communication, with the ability to explain complex technical decisions to engineers, product partners, and customer-facing teams. - Demonstrated ability to mentor engineers and influence outcomes without relying on formal authority. - Bachelor’s or Master’s (preferred) degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience. ### Preferred qualifications - 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. --- SingleStore delivers our cloud-native database with the speed and scale to power the world’s data-intensive applications. With a distributed SQL database that introduces simplicity to your data architecture by unifying transactions and analytics, SingleStore empowers digital leaders to deliver exceptional, real-time data experiences to their customers. SingleStore is venture-backed and headquartered in San Francisco with offices in Sunnyvale, Raleigh, Seattle, Boston, London, Lisbon, Bangalore, Dublin and Kyiv. Consistent with our commitment to diversity & inclusion, we value individuals with the ability to work on diverse teams and with a diverse range of people. *To all recruitment agencies: SingleStore does not accept agency resumes. Please do not forward resumes to SingleStore employees. SingleStore is not responsible for any fees related to unsolicited resumes and will not pay fees to any third-party agency or company that does not have a signed agreement with the Company.* SingleStore values individuals for their unique skills and experiences, and we’re proud to offer roles in a variety of locations across the United States. Salary is based on permissible, non-discriminatory factors such as skills, experience, and geographic location, and is just one part of our total compensation and benefits package. Certain roles are also eligible for additional rewards, including merit increases and annual bonuses. *Our benefits package for this role includes: stock options, flexible paid time off, monthly three-day weekends, 14 weeks of fully-paid gender-neutral parental leave, fertility and adoption assistance, mental health counseling, 401(k) retirement plan, and rich health insurance offerings—including medical, dental, vision and life and disability insurance.* *SingleStore’s base salary range for this position is: $160,000 - $210,000 USD.* *For candidates residing in California, please see our [California Recruitment Privacy Notice](https://www.singlestore.com/singlestore-california-recruitment-privacy-notice/). For candidates residing in the EEA, UK, and Switzerland, please see our [EEA, UK, and Swiss Recruitment Privacy Notice](https://www.singlestore.com/recruitment-privacy/).* ENG000526