Staff Internal Product Engineer

Aiven; Helsinki; Hybrid; EUR 130,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity plan

Hybrid work policy

Equipment budget

Professional Development Budget

Employee Assistance Program

Time off policy

Job summary

Aiven is seeking a Staff Engineer to own the engineering system for our internal applications, enabling safe, maintainable and scalable development across the company.

You will directly own our hiring platform and the shared credential gateway, guiding teams to adopt and improve them. You will build on Aiven Runtime as the demanding internal customer, feeding learnings back to product teams and evolving the shared layer for broad use.

Responsibilities

• Own the engineering system for Aiven’s internal applications, enabling safe, maintainable and efficient development.
• Directly own our hiring platform and the credential gateway; guide teams to use them.
• Build on Aiven Runtime as its demanding internal customer; feed learnings back to product teams.
• As Staff engineer, impact comes via influence beyond your team.
• Join a small team behind data, systems, and internal software at Helsinki HQ; office three days a week.
• Within two months: first prod apps on Aiven Runtime; within six months: improvements to hiring platform and gateway; within a year: default for new builds.

Job description

About The Job

We're a global team of over 400 people, working together to push the boundaries of open-source technology and multi-cloud solutions. Our vision is to help developers, builders, and creators bring their ideas to life with speed and simplicity, by providing a cloud data platform that makes open-source databases, search, streaming, and application infrastructure easily accessible to everyone.

About The Job

We're a global team of over 400 people, working together to push the boundaries of open-source technology and multi-cloud solutions. Our vision is to help developers, builders, and creators bring their ideas to life with speed and simplicity, by providing a cloud data platform that makes open-source databases, search, streaming, and application infrastructure easily accessible to everyone.

The role

AI has dramatically expanded who can build software inside Aiven. People across Finance, People, GTM and Marketing now turn operational problems into working applications much faster than before, and Product Development is starting to build too. Our engineering foundations need to catch up with that new way of working.

You’ll own the engineering system for Aiven’s internal applications: one foundation that makes building at this scale safe, maintainable and efficient, so applications are easy to maintain, merge and split as the business changes.

You’ll prove it on real products. You’ll directly own our hiring platform and the gateway that gives applications controlled access to our business systems, and use them to find what the shared layer gets wrong before everyone else depends on it. Then you’ll help teams across the company move onto it.

You’ll build on Aiven Runtime, our own product, as its demanding internal customer. What you learn running real applications on it goes back to the product teams.

As a Staff engineer, your impact is mostly outside your own team, and your leverage comes through influence rather than authority.

You’ll join a small team responsible for the data, systems and internal software behind how Aiven operates, based at our Helsinki HQ. We work together in the office three days a week.

Within two months, you’ve got the first applications running in production on Aiven Runtime. Within six months, you’ve shipped the improvements our hiring platform and gateway need most and built what you learned into the shared layer, most of our actively developed applications run on the shared layer, and people across the business ship on it without waiting for you. Within a year, it’s the default for everything new we build.

What You’ll Own

• Build on our existing engineering foundations. Evolve our shared infrastructure into a supported way to build, deploy and operate internal applications and agents, designed so AI coding agents can follow it as reliably as engineers. Identify what’s missing, improve what already works and build reusable components and tooling where they genuinely reduce duplicated work. Make deliberate decisions about which capabilities should be shared, which existing tools are sufficient and where teams need flexibility.
• Own and develop central applications. Own our hiring platform and shared credential gateway, and drive their next improvements. The hiring platform uses TypeScript, React, Fastify and Aiven for PostgreSQL; parts of our wider application estate use Python. You’ll work across application code, infrastructure and production operations, and evolve these systems as business needs change.
• Set the technical direction for internal applications. Establish pragmatic engineering standards and architectural patterns. Make decisions about authentication, integrations, deployment and operational concerns, balancing consistency with the freedom teams need to solve different problems. Review designs across Aiven, set the technical standards for this layer, and resolve conflicting technical approaches.
• Make software safe and reliable to operate. Own the release paths, migrations, failure handling and operational controls for the systems you maintain. Establish reusable approaches to security, access control and unattended automation, including what agents and automated workflows may do without human approval. Enforce important boundaries in code rather than relying on instructions alone.
• Enable others to build independently. Work with people across Finance, People, Sales and company operations, including people who aren’t professional software engineers. Help them build and operate their own applications, and raise how well they build, including how they use AI. Improve the development experience, remove recurring technical bottlenecks and establish patterns others can use without needing you in the room. Business functions remain responsible for their applications’ purpose and adoption; you’re accountable for how fast, safe and efficient it is to build and run them.

What We’re Looking For

• You've owned meaningful production software end to end, including what happens when it breaks.
• You have strong software engineering depth and are comfortable owning the infrastructure and production environment underneath what you build.
• You’ve influenced engineering decisions outside your immediate team through design review, mentoring and the standards you set, and other engineers trust the patterns you establish.
• You use AI coding agents as a serious part of how you build software, and understand where they fail. You’ve designed the context, tests, permissions and review boundaries that make agent-produced changes safe to ship.
• You make architecture and product trade-offs under ambiguity, including deciding what not to build.
• Typically 8+ years of building and operating software.

Nice to have

• Building internal developer platforms or shared foundations used by several teams
• TypeScript and React, Python, and PostgreSQL
• Identity and access control, or systems handling sensitive personal data
• Putting agents and unattended automation into production with technical controls

Global Benefits

Our global benefits are designed to help you thrive and grow, personally and professionally:

• Participate in Aiven's equity plan.
• Balance work and life with our hybrid work policy.
• Choose the equipment you need to set yourself up for success.
• Use your Professional Development Plan budget for learning opportunities.
• Receive holistic wellbeing support through our global Employee Assistance Program.
• Inquire about our Global Time Off Commitment (Parental and Sick Leave, as well as Personal Time)
• Enjoy country-specific benefits for our global cast.

Equal opportunities

Aiven provides equal employment opportunities to all qualified employees and applicants for employment without regard to age, gender identity, national or ethnic origin, religion, sexual orientation, physical and mental ability, marital and family status or without regard to any other similar personal attributes. Aiven complies with applicable local laws governing non-discrimination in employment in every location in which the company operates. This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation, training and any other terms and conditions related to employment.

At Aiven we are committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities or special needs in our working environment and job application procedures. We make all reasonable accommodations for persons with disabilities or who otherwise need support to thrive in the workplace. We are committed to continuously improving workplace accessibility. There is an option to request a discussion in the application process but if you have any questions before applying please write to us at [e-mail].