About the role

Role overview

Estuary is seeking a Senior Software Engineer (Systems Engineer) to join the Capture or Materialization teams. You will build high-performance connectors that extract data from diverse sources and reliably load it into downstream destinations in real time.

This is a polyglot engineering environment focused on deep investigation of SaaS/database behaviors and translating that into robust, production-grade integrations.

Responsibilities

Master SaaS & protocol internals: research SaaS API and database protocol behavior (e.g., rate limits, consistency models, edge cases) and determine robust interaction strategies.
Build and maintain polyglot integrations: design and operate scalable connectors, primarily in Go, with contributions in Python and Rust where appropriate.
Architect for reliability: implement distributed state handling, exactly-once delivery guarantees, and backpressure management to prevent data loss or duplication.
Navigate technical entropy: bridge external API “messiness” with high-performance requirements of the Estuary core engine.
Collaborate & mentor: contribute to technical design docs and participate in code reviews, improving performance, correctness, and developer experience.

Requirements

8+ years of backend engineering experience building and operating production-grade systems at scale.
Strong proficiency in Go; comfortable working in or learning Python and Rust.
Systems thinking and “detective work” to understand third-party docs/API behavior.
Data fluency: checkpointing, schema drift, and consistency model trade-offs.
Strong fundamentals: concurrency, memory management, and networking (e.g., gRPC, TCP/IP).
Ability to clearly explain complex technical trade-offs to technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Bonus points

Experience with Rust.
Background with CDC and streaming technologies such as Kafka or Flink.
Experience contributing to data-centric open source.
Experience working in fast-paced startups while maintaining long-term system stability.

About Estuary

Estuary is a real-time data integration platform for both fast-moving developers and large-scale enterprises. It combines change data capture (CDC), stream processing, and declarative configuration to simplify complex data movement and enable reliable, low-latency pipelines without managing data infrastructure.