Senior Software Engineer, Platform

Airbyte; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 130,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

Airbyte is looking for a Software Engineer to join their Data Replication team in San Francisco, CA. This role involves scaling cloud data replication systems and building AI-powered tools to improve operations. The ideal candidate will have over 7 years of engineering experience with a strong proficiency in JVM/Kotlin and familiarity with Kubernetes.

Join Airbyte to leverage your skills and contribute to essential system improvements. The position requires onsite presence for 4 days a week, ensuring active collaboration with the team.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of engineering experience in backend, platform, or distributed systems.
• Hands-on experience with large scale distributed systems.
• Experience running services in major cloud environments.

Responsibilities

• Improve and scale cloud data replication and job lifecycle systems.
• Automate platform operations across OSS, Enterprise, and Cloud.
• Build high-leverage internal tooling for faster deployments.
• Mentor engineers through design reviews and feedback.

Skills

Proficiency in JVM/Kotlin

Building large scale distributed systems

Familiarity with orchestration frameworks

Experiences with Kubernetes and Helm

Systems-level thinking

Comfort with ambiguity

Job description

The Role

You'll be a Software Engineer on the Data Replication team - a full-stack product team running over 3 million sync jobs a week across multiple regions and clouds.

Your focus: the Control and Data Plane systems that handle configuration, job lifecycle, and load scaling, plus Destinations, the strategic integrations Airbyte writes to. You'll occasionally go deep into infrastructure when the problem demands it.

We expect engineers here to actively use AI as a force multiplier - agentic tools to automate toil, augment incident response, and build smarter internal tooling. Newer to this? We’ll work with you to build fluency fast. We care as much about how you work as what you build. Trust, directness, and craftsmanship matter here.

What You’ll Do

• Improve and scale cloud data replication and job lifecycle systems as Airbyte Cloud grows.

• Automate platform operations across OSS, Enterprise, and Cloud: deployment validation, release qualification, environment testing.

• Build high-leverage internal tooling that helps the team ship connector and CDK changes faster.

• Develop AI-powered tooling for connector generation and incident response.

• Improve observability and debugging tools for both Airbyte engineers and customers.

• Collaborate across platform and cloud infrastructure on cross-cutting technical decisions.

• Mentor engineers through design reviews, pairing and technical feedback.

What You’ll Need

• 7+ years of engineering experience (backend, platform, or distributed systems) with strong proficiency in JVM/Kotlin.

• Hands-on experience building/operating large scale distributed systems.

• Familiarity with orchestration frameworks (e.g. Temporal-style workflows).

• Experience running services using Kubernetes using Helm on major cloud providers.

• Systems-level thinking with an emphasis on performance, reliability, cost, and scalability.

• Comfortable with ambiguity, moving fast, and owning problems end-to-end.

Nice To Have

• Experience with open-source platforms, especially in data integration or infrastructure tooling.

• Familiarity with Airbyte, CDKs, or connector-based architectures.

• Background in control plane / data plane architectures or internal developer platforms.

• Experience with AI/agent tooling frameworks (LangChain, Pydantic AI, or similar).

Location

• Onsite 4 days/week in San Francisco, CA

If you find this role exciting, we encourage you to apply even if you think you don’t meet all of the requirements!

Airbyte is an equal opportunity employer that does not discriminate on the basis of actual or perceived race, creed, color, religion, national origin, ancestry, age, physical or mental disability, pregnancy, genetic information, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, marital status, familial status, domestic violence victim status, veteran or military status, or any other legally recognized protected basis under federal, state or local laws. Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

Airbyte is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities in our job application procedures. Please let us know if you need assistance or accommodations due to a disability.