Staff Software Engineer, Stream Compute

Monograph; United States; On-site; USD 224,000 - 336,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Company bonus

401(k) plan

Medical, dental, and vision benefits

Wellness stipends

Job summary

Monograph is seeking a Staff Engineer to design and deliver innovative stream compute infrastructure using Apache Flink. This role focuses on meeting high availability targets, working with cross-functional teams to implement operational best practices, and driving automation in systems.

The ideal candidate has extensive experience in distributed systems and big data technologies, possesses strong software engineering skills, and is capable of working autonomously. The position offers a competitive salary and additional benefits that include equity and a comprehensive health plan.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience building, operating, and evolving large-scale production systems.
• Experience as a technical lead for teams working on distributed systems.
• Hands-on experience with big data technologies such as Flink, Spark, Kafka.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate stream compute infrastructure with Apache Flink.
• Partner with product and platform teams to unblock Flink adoption.
• Define operational best practices to improve resilience and reliability.

Skills

Big Data Distributed Systems

Apache Flink

Kafka

Software Engineering

Distributed Systems

Tools

AWS Services

SQL

Job description

What you’ll do

You'll help define and deliver the next generation of Stripe’s Flink‑first stream compute infrastructure—driving innovation to meet extremely high availability targets at global scale. Partnering with infrastructure engineers, adjacent platform teams, and the product orgs that depend on Flink every day, you’ll set a long‑term technical direction that scales with Stripe’s growth while enabling reliable, efficient operations for years to come. You’ll work on the hardest problems in operating Flink in production—state management, exactly‑once processing, performance isolation, and automated recovery—so teams across Stripe can confidently build stateful stream processing applications on top of it.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate stream compute infrastructure with Apache Flink at the center, alongside technologies like Kafka, Temporal, and AWS services
• Partner with product and platform teams across Stripe to understand requirements, unblock Flink adoption, and improve how stream processing infrastructure is used end‑to‑end
• Define and implement operational best practices (e.g., shuffle sharding, cellular architecture, load shedding, automated state recovery) to improve resilience and reliability at scale
• Drive fleet‑level automation and standardization (“pets” to “cattle”) through self‑service workflows, safer rollouts, and self‑healing systems that reduce manual operations
• Lead initiatives that raise the bar on Flink availability and state durability (e.g., multi‑region strategies, disaster recovery readiness, operational readiness reviews, incident learning)
• Evaluate and productionize Flink ecosystem capabilities (e.g., SQL, connectors, state backends) to improve developer experience and scalability without compromising reliability
• Work closely with the open source community to identify opportunities for adopting new open source features as well as contribute back to OSS

Who you are

We’re looking for someone who meets the minimum requirements to be considered for the role. If you meet these requirements, you are encouraged to apply. The preferred qualifications are a bonus, not a requirement.

Minimum requirements

• This is a Staff‑level role - that typically means 10+ years of experience building, operating, and evolving large‐scale production systems
• Experience as a technical lead for team(s) working on distributed systems, including scaling them in fast‑moving environments
• Hands‑on experience with big data technologies such as Flink, Spark, Kafka, Pulsar, or Pinot
• Experience developing, maintaining and debugging distributed systems built with open‑source tools
• Experience building and scaling infrastructure as a product
• Strong software engineering skills and a passion for Big Data Distributed Systems
• Ability to write high quality code (in programming languages like Go, Java, Scala, etc)
• Comfortable operating with high autonomy and ownership
• Growth mindset and a willingness to learn quickly, explore ambiguous problem spaces, and dive deep when needed
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to produce clear technical documentation

Preferred qualifications

• Experience operating streaming infrastructure as a platform (e.g., Flink clusters, Kafka, Pulsar) for internal customers at scale
• Deep hands‑on experience authoring, optimizing, and operating real‑time processing frameworks such as Flink, Spark Streaming, Storm, or Kafka Streams in production
• Experience building or operating control planes for managing large‑scale infrastructure
• Open source contributions to data processing or big data systems (Hadoop, Spark, Celeborn, Flink, etc)

Salary and Benefits

The annual US base salary range for this role is $224,000 - $336,000. Additional benefits for this role may include equity, company bonus or sales commissions/bonuses, a 401(k) plan, medical, dental, and vision benefits, and wellness stipends.