Staff Distributed Systems Engineer – Collaboration

Role Overview

• Collaborate with exceptional engineers on building systems and services for the world's largest companies. This platform powers millions of production websites and supports massive scale, including over 1% of global Internet traffic and more than 10 billion monthly visits.
• Lead architecture for distributed services at scale that synchronize shared state across clients, including clear correctness guarantees (eg: ordering, idempotency, convergence). These services require low latency and high availability, with SLO of 99.99% uptime.
• Define concurrency and conflict-resolution semantics for concurrent changes, including trade-offs and constraints.
• Design for failure: retries, partial outages, reconnection, and safe recovery paths, with explicit degradation behavior.
• Own operational excellence: define SLIs/SLOs, instrument tracing/metrics/logging, and drive reliability improvements through incident learning.
• Drive cross-team technical alignment via design docs and decision records; unblock execution across org boundaries.
• Raise the bar through design and code reviews, mentoring, and pragmatic standardization that increases leverage.
• Deliver maintainable, tested, performant systems and evolve them with a “crawl, walk, run” plan.
• Use modern tooling (including AI-assisted coding, debugging and code review) to improve developer velocity and reduce time-to-diagnosis in production.
• Participate in engineering citizenship activities such as co-authoring engineering blogs, strengthening and improving our hiring processes, and leading internal hackathon teams.

Requirements

• BA/BS degree or equivalent experience
• At least 7, preferably 10+ years of building and operating large-scale production distributed systems where latency, correctness, and reliability (99.99% uptime) are non-negotiable.
• Deep backend systems experience in one or more modern server environments (e.g., Java, Go, Rust, Python, Node.js, etc.), with the ability to ramp and adapt quickly in new stacks.
• Expertise with distributed systems, concurrency, scaling, and debugging multi-layer systems.
• Strong operational judgment: you define SLIs/SLOs, build observability, and improve systems via incidents and feedback loops, not heroics.
• Staff behaviors: you lead multi-team initiatives, write decision-quality design docs, influence architecture beyond your immediate team, and communicate across the organization.
• Ability to make decisions with incomplete information, understand and communicate one-way vs. two-way doors, and move with urgency while keeping critical code operational.
• Stay curious and open to growth — actively building fluency in emerging technologies like AI to unlock creativity, accelerate progress, and amplify impact.

Tech Stack

• Distributed Systems
• Java
• JavaScript
• Node.js
• Python
• Rust
• Go

Benefits

• Ownership in what you help build. Every permanent Webflower receives equity (RSUs) in our growing, privately held company.
• Health coverage that actually covers you. Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision plans for full-time employees and their dependents, with Webflow covering most premiums.
• Support for every stage of family life. 12 weeks of paid parental leave for all parents and 6+ weeks of additional paid leave for birthing parents. Plus inclusive care for family planning, menopause, and midlife transitions.
• Time off that’s actually off. Flexible vacation, paid holidays, and a sabbatical program to help you recharge and come back inspired.
• Wellness for the whole you. Access to mental health resources, therapy and coaching.
• Invest in your future. A 401(k) with 100% employer match (up to $6,000/year) in the U.S., and support for retirement savings globally.
• Monthly stipends that flex with your life. Localized support for work and wellness expenses — from Wi-Fi to workouts.
• Bonus for building together. All full-time, permanent, non-commission employees are eligible for our annual WIN bonus program.