About the team
The Streaming Compute team owns the platform that powers large-scale data processing at Shopify with Apache Flink. We provide the infrastructure and tooling that lets teams across the company build, deploy, and operate streaming and batch data pipelines reliably and efficiently. Our platform powers business critical use cases, such as recommendations, catalog, as well as analytics workloads.
Our work spans the full platform: making pipeline development fast and self-serve, improving performance and stability of the underlying compute engine, and keeping the platform cost-efficient as it scales. In this role, you'll work on distributed systems and developer experience, making powerful data processing simple and dependable for every engineer at Shopify.
About the role
As we broaden the scope of our platform, we're looking for a Staff Engineer with demonstrated expertise in Apache Flink. Shopify runs Flink at significant scale, powering both streaming and batch pipelines behind our core products and data-driven features, and we're investing deeply in the next generation of the platform: faster pipeline development, stronger performance and reliability from the engine itself, and efficient operation as workloads grow. You'll work alongside the team to push the boundaries of the core Flink ecosystem, both internally and in the open source community. As a domain expert, you'll shape the technical direction of the platform, dig into the hardest engine-level problems, and raise the bar for how the team builds and operates Flink at scale.
What you'll bring (we don’t expect you to have done all of this):
Reflexively use AI to accelerate and improve your daily work.
Are an established expert in Apache Flink: You've operated it in production at scale, understand its internals (runtime, state, checkpointing, memory model, connectors), and can debug and tune it at the engine level, not just the API level.
Have contributed to Flink or its ecosystem in the open source community through code, FLIPs, reviews, or active involvement, or have the depth and appetite to start.
Have strong distributed systems fundamentals: stream and batch processing semantics, storage and table formats, resource management, and running data infrastructure on Kubernetes.
Can lead through influence: setting technical direction, mentoring senior engineers, and driving cross-team initiatives from ambiguous problems to shipped outcomes.
Care about developer experience and pragmatism: you build platforms that other engineers love to use, and you know when to tune, when to rewrite, and when to upstream.
Join the 24/7 on-call rotation.
At Shopify, we pride ourselves on moving quickly—not just in shipping, but in our hiring process as well. If you're ready to apply, please be prepared to interview with us within the week. Our goal is to complete the entire interview loop within 30 days. You will be expected to complete a live pair programming session, come prepared with your own IDE.
Expert in Apache Flink with production-scale operation, strong distributed systems fundamentals, Kubernetes experience, ability to lead through influence, and participation in 24/7 on-call rotation.
Key Responsibilities
- shaping technical direction
- mentoring senior engineers
- operating Flink at scale
Skills & Tools
Apache Flink, Kubernetes
Job Details
- Category: Software Development
- Seniority: Senior Level
- Commitment: Full Time
- Workplace: Remote — North America
- Languages: English
About Shopify
A commerce platform that powers large-scale data processing and streaming compute. — Industry: Information Technology