Senior Software Engineer, Product Data Platform

Brex Brex · Fintech · San Francisco, CA +2 · Engineering

Senior Software Engineer on the Product Data Platform team at Brex, focusing on building and operating high-performance data, query, and search infrastructure. The role involves optimizing complex query plans, driving schema improvements, debugging latency issues, designing distributed systems, and implementing caching strategies. Experience with JVM ecosystem (Kotlin/Java) and relational databases is required, with bonus points for OpenSearch/Elasticsearch and multi-tenant platforms. While the team builds AI-powered data products like an agentic reporting experience, the core focus of this role is on the underlying data infrastructure and backend systems, not direct AI/ML model development.

What you'd actually do

  1. Analyze and optimize complex query plans, execution paths, cost models, joins, and indexing strategies.
  2. Drive schema and access-pattern improvements to resolve systemic performance bottlenecks.
  3. Debug and remediate P95/P99 latency issues under load in production systems.
  4. Design and operate distributed systems with thoughtful tradeoffs around consistency, latency, caching, and failure modes.
  5. Evaluate existing architectures to proactively identify scaling risks and long-term reliability gaps.

Skills

Required

  • backend engineering
  • production systems at scale
  • platforms or infrastructure
  • relational databases
  • Postgres or Aurora
  • query plan design and analysis
  • indexing strategies
  • database optimization
  • communication skills
  • collaborate cross-functionally

Nice to have

  • OpenSearch / Elasticsearch
  • multi-tenant or data-heavy platforms

What the JD emphasized

  • 7+ years of backend engineering experience building and operating production systems at scale.
  • Experience building platforms or infrastructure used by real customers.