Staff Software Engineer, Product Data Platform

Why join us

• Brex is the intelligent finance platform that enables companies to spend smarter and move faster in more than 200 markets.
• By combining global corporate cards and banking with intuitive spend management, bill pay, and travel software, Brex enables founders and finance teams to accelerate operations, gain real-time visibility, and control spend effortlessly.
• Brex's AI-native automation and world-class service eliminate manual expense and accounting tasks for customers so they can focus on what matters most.
• Tens of thousands of the world's best companies run on Brex, including DoorDash, Coinbase, Robinhood, Zoom, Plaid, Reddit, and SeatGeek.
• Working at Brex allows you to push your limits, challenge the status quo, and collaborate with some of the brightest minds in the industry.
• We're committed to building a diverse team and inclusive culture and believe your potential should only be limited by how big you can dream.
• We make this a reality by empowering you with the tools, resources, and support you need to grow your career.

Engineering at Brex

• Engineering at Brex is about building systems that scale with speed and intention.
• Our teams span Software, Data, Security, and IT, and operate with high autonomy and deep collaboration.
• We tackle hard technical problems, own our outcomes, and push for excellence at every level — from architecture to deployment.
• It's an environment where engineering is a craft, and builders become leaders.

Where you'll work

This role will be based in our San Francisco 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.

As a perk, we also have up to four weeks per year of fully remote work!

What you'll do

• 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.

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, 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).

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.

Compensation:

• The expected salary range for this role is $240,000 - $300,000. However, the starting base pay will depend on a number of factors including the candidate's location, skills, experience, market demands, and internal pay parity.

Brex LLC is a wholly owned subsidiary of Capital One, N.A.

Please be aware, job-seekers may be at risk of targeting by malicious actors looking for personal data. Brex recruiters will only reach out via LinkedIn or email with a brex.com domain. Any outreach claiming to be from Brex via other sources should be ignored.