Senior Software Engineer II AI-Native, Messaging

Role Description

This is a hands-on senior engineering role for someone who has already made AI a first-class collaborator in their work.

• Design streaming services, write and review code, own production incidents, and ship infrastructure.
• Help shape the team's technical direction on Kafka-first streaming infrastructure and the next phase of our high-availability roadmap.
• Evolve how the team works with AI — the prompts, the evals, the review patterns, and the escape hatches when agents go sideways.

What You'll Do

• Design, build, and operate streaming services on Kafka, Spring Boot, and Spring Cloud Stream.
• Develop and manage Kafka connectors for data integration (DynamoDB, S3, NSQ, custom sinks/sources).
• Own schema management and evolution across Protobuf, Schema Registry, and multi-language code generation.
• Drive platform migrations (MSK → Confluent Cloud, NSQ → Kafka).
• Build monitoring, alerting, and operational tooling (DataDog, PagerDuty, Prometheus).
• Write infrastructure as code in Terraform and participate in the on-call rotation and incident response.
• Work AI-natively as the default mode of operation.
• Evolve the team's AI-native practices — prompt libraries, evals, review rituals, and guardrails.
• Mentor teammates, raise the bar on technical standards, and contribute to the team's API design, data contracts, and integration patterns.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of backend software engineering experience.
• Strong proficiency with Java and Spring Boot.
• Production experience with Apache Kafka or a comparable distributed streaming platform.
• Solid grounding in distributed systems concepts: consistency, fault tolerance, replication, delivery semantics, and data durability tradeoffs.
• Comfortable with AWS (or equivalent cloud) and containerized deployments on Kubernetes.
• Hands-on experience with Terraform or comparable IaC for real, multi-environment infrastructure.

AI-native working style

• Prompting excellence — provide agents context, constraints, and expected outcomes.
• Critical validation — explain every line the agent wrote and correct it as needed.
• Agentic decomposition — break ambiguous problems into discrete, verifiable sub-tasks.
• Parallel workstreams — run multiple agents or sessions concurrently on independent tasks.
• Troubleshooting with AI — diagnose and recover from agent errors.
• Technical authority — understand the underlying tech well enough to catch the agent when it's confidently wrong.

What matters most to us

• Problem-solving mindset — structure ambiguous problems precisely before reaching for a tool.
• Ownership — take a feature from design through production.
• Direct, respectful communication — explain technical tradeoffs clearly and push back when necessary.
• Collaborative — work well across teams and value diverse perspectives.

Nice-to-have

• Go experience.
• gRPC and Protocol Buffers in production.
• Stream processing frameworks — Kafka Streams, Flink.
• Confluent Platform or Confluent Cloud specifics.
• CI/CD with GitHub Actions, artifact management.
• Observability tooling — DataDog, Prometheus, Grafana.
• Prior experience on large-scale platform migrations or infrastructure modernization programs.
• Building or running evals for LLM-based workflows, prompt libraries, or agent tooling.

Compensation

For candidates based in the US, the salary range for this position is $148,000 to $216,500 USD. The compensation package includes a wide range of medical, dental, vision, financial, and other benefits, as well as equity.

Benefits

• Competitive pay and benefits.
• Medical, dental, vision, life and disability insurance plans (100% paid for US employees).
• 401(k) plan with company matching program in the US and RRSP with DPSP plan for Canadian employees.
• Employee Assistance Program (EAP) for mental wellness.
• Flexible PTO and 12 company-wide days off throughout the year.
• Learning & Development programs.
• Equipment, tools, and reimbursement support for a productive remote environment.
• Free Life360 Platinum Membership for your preferred circle.