Senior Staff Software Engineer, Distributed Systems

Webflow Webflow · Enterprise · CA · Remote · Engineering

Senior Staff Software Engineer to lead the technical future of Convert, Webflow's AI-native suite of products for experimentation, personalization, and revenue generation. This role involves architecting and evolving high-throughput distributed systems and data infrastructure that support AI/ML capabilities, serving large enterprises. The engineer will set technical vision, lead cross-team initiatives, and ensure operational excellence for AI-powered backend systems.

What you'd actually do

  1. Set the long-term technical vision and architecture for backend systems powering experimentation, personalization, analytics, and conversion optimization across Webflow.
  2. Architect and evolve high-throughput distributed systems and APIs that ingest, process, and serve large volumes of visitor and event data with low latency, high availability, and strong consistency guarantees where it matters.
  3. Lead foundational platform investments and the data infrastructure that supports them, that unlock new product capabilities for years to come.
  4. Partner closely with data scientists, ML engineers, and product engineers to productionize statistical and AI/ML capabilities into reliable, real-time backend infrastructure.
  5. Lead complex, multi-team, multi-quarter technical initiatives end-to-end: from problem framing and technical strategy through implementation, launch, and long-term operational ownership.

Skills

Required

  • 12+ years of software engineering experience
  • architecting and operating backend systems and distributed systems at significant scale
  • strong technical foundation across multiple programming languages such as Python, Java, or Go
  • deep fluency in modern frameworks, distributed systems patterns, and large-scale system design
  • designed, built, and operated high-throughput, data-intensive distributed systems in production
  • deep understanding of scalability, fault tolerance, consistency tradeoffs, observability, and performance optimization
  • demonstrated technical leadership across ambiguous, cross-pillar initiatives
  • influencing architecture, execution, and engineering strategy well beyond your immediate team
  • Partner effectively with product, design, data science, and ML stakeholders
  • translate evolving business needs and customer outcomes into scalable technical solutions
  • strong judgment
  • communicate clearly with both technical and executive audiences
  • make pragmatic tradeoffs in fast-moving environments
  • proactive embrace of AI

Nice to have

  • BS / BA college degree or relevant experience

What the JD emphasized

  • AI-native
  • AI/ML capabilities
  • AI/ML infrastructure
  • productionize statistical and AI/ML capabilities
  • rethinking what a modern, AI-native conversion platform can be

Other signals

  • AI-native Digital Experience Platform
  • AI/ML capabilities into reliable, real-time backend infrastructure
  • AI/ML infrastructure
  • rethinking what a modern, AI-native conversion platform can be