Staff Infrastructure Engineer - Streaming Compute (Americas)

About the role About the team The Streaming Compute team owns the platform that powers large-scale data processing at Shopify with Apache Flink. We provide the infrastructure and tooling that lets teams across the company build, deploy, and operate streaming and batch data pipelines reliably and efficiently. Our platform powers business critical use cases, such as recommendations, catalog, as well as analytics workloads. Our work spans the full platform: making pipeline development fast and self-serve, improving performance and stability of the underlying compute engine, and keeping the platform cost-efficient as it scales. In this role, you'll work on distributed systems and developer experience, making powerful data processing simple and dependable for every engineer at Shopify. About the role As we broaden the scope of our platform, we're looking for a Staff Engineer with demonstrated expertise in Apache Flink. Shopify runs Flink at significant scale, powering both streaming and batch pipelines behind our core products and data-driven features, and we're investing deeply in the next generation of the platform: faster pipeline development, stronger performance and reliability from the engine itself, and efficient operation as workloads grow. You'll work alongside the team to push the boundaries of the core Flink ecosystem, both internally and in the open source community. As a domain expert, you'll shape the technical direction of the platform, dig into the hardest engine-level problems, and raise the bar for how the team builds and operates Flink at scale. What you'll bring (we don’t expect you to have done all of this): Reflexively use AI to accelerate and improve your daily work. Are an established expert in Apache Flink: You've operated it in production at scale, understand its internals (runtime, state, checkpointing, memory model, connectors), and can debug and tune it at the engine level, not just the API level. Have contributed to Flink or its ecosystem in the open source community through code, FLIPs, reviews, or active involvement, or have the depth and appetite to start. Have strong distributed systems fundamentals: stream and batch processing semantics, storage and table formats, resource management, and running data infrastructure on Kubernetes. Can lead through influence: setting technical direction, mentoring senior engineers, and driving cross-team initiatives from ambiguous problems to shipped outcomes. Care about developer experience and pragmatism: you build platforms that other engineers love to use, and you know when to tune, when to rewrite, and when to upstream. Join the 24/7 on-call rotation. At Shopify, we pride ourselves on moving quickly—not just in shipping, but in our hiring process as well. If you're ready to apply, please be prepared to interview with us within the week. Our goal is to complete the entire interview loop within 30 days. You will be expected to complete a live pair programming session, come prepared with your own IDE. About Shopify Opportunity is not evenly distributed. Shopify puts independence within reach for anyone with a dream to start a business. We propel entrepreneurs and enterprises to scale the heights of their potential. Since 2006, we’ve grown to over 8,300 employees and generated over $1 trillion in sales for millions of merchants in 175 countries. This is life-defining work that directly impacts people’s lives as much as it transforms your own. This is putting the power of the few in the hands of the many, is a future with more voices rather than fewer, and is creating more choices instead of an elite option. About you Moving at our pace brings a lot of change, complexity, and ambiguity—and a little bit of chaos. Shopifolk thrive on that and are comfortable being uncomfortable. That means Shopify is not the right place for everyone. Before you apply, consider if you can: Care deeply about what you do and about making commerce better for everyone Excel by seeking professional and personal hypergrowth Keep up with an unrelenting pace (the week, not the quarter) Be resilient and resourceful in face of ambiguity and thrive on (rather than endure) change Bring critical thought and opinion Put AI agents and tools to work on the tasks they're built for, and focus on the work only humans can do Embrace differences and disagreement to get shit done and move forward Work digital-first for your daily work We may use AI-enabled tools to screen, select, and assess applications. All AI outputs are reviewed and validated by our recruitment team.