Staff Software Engineer

Overview

Staff Software Engineer on the backend systems that move data through Nexla, covering JVM services, the Kafka-based streaming runtime, and distributed processing, with ownership from design through deploy and on-call.

What you'll do

• Design and ship core framework features, including schema evolution, pagination, rate limiting, circuit breaking, and automated retries and self-recovery.
• Write, document, and use the SDKs and interfaces that other teams build on.
• Operate the streaming and processing path in production, including Kafka, Spark, and Flink workloads, checkpointing, backpressure, and failure recovery.
• Set technical direction for multi-tenancy, high concurrency, and low latency architecture, and make technology calls on JVM versus alternative runtimes and infrastructure cost versus reliability.
• Trace failures across Kafka clusters, distributed runtimes, and third-party APIs, fix them, and build guardrails to prevent recurrence.
• Work directly with Product and the CTO to turn customer needs and market shifts, including GenAI data ingestion, real-time CDC, and agentic workflows, into technical plans.
• Set team standards through code review, design sessions, and RFCs, runbooks, and docs.

What you'll need

• 10 to 14 years of software engineering, with significant time building platforms, frameworks, or SDKs rather than end-user applications.
• Expert-level Java, including JVM memory management, concurrency models, and non-blocking I/O.
• Deep experience operating distributed systems in production, such as Kafka, Spark, Flink, or similar.
• Comfort with the modern data stack and related protocols, including Snowflake, Databricks, gRPC, GraphQL, webhooks, and CDC.
• Experience owning production systems and applying good operational discipline.
• Use of AI tools in your actual work, with specific judgment on where they help and where they mislead.

Nice to have

• Contributions to open-source data projects such as Airbyte, Flink, Debezium, or Arrow.
• Time at an iPaaS or ELT company such as MuleSoft, Fivetran, Informatica, Airbyte, or similar.
• Deep Kubernetes and cloud-native experience, including Strimzi for Kafka.
• Security architecture experience with OAuth 2.0, mTLS, and encrypted credential management at scale.

Details

• Location: Bengaluru, Karnataka, India.
• Hybrid work, two days a week in office.
• Overlap with morning Pacific hours for syncs, design reviews, and collaboration with US-based teams.
• On-call is part of the role.
• Compensation includes base salary and equity.