Staff Data Platform Software Engineer - veza

Description

You will join the Graph Data Platform team as a Staff Software Engineer. The team builds the access graph behind the company's identity and access management products.

The role focuses on designing, improving, and maintaining the scalable, reliable code that powers that graph. You will work closely with other teams to shape the product and deliver strong identity and access management experiences to customers.

The work centres on cutting-edge technology in a high-impact team.

Responsibilities

• Act as the technical expert for the access graph, turning broad technical, functional, or business challenges into initiatives the organisation can carry out.
• Solve hard problems that have no precedent in the company or the field, from architecture through to implementation.
• Be the go-to subject-matter expert for your area, and set the team's coding standards and engineering practices.
• Find ways to simplify systems and remove redundancy, driving large-scale simplification across the platform.
• Make significant hands-on technical contributions and lead design reviews for workstreams.
• Raise the bar for code quality, testing, documentation, and support, and share best practices in a form teammates can easily use.
• Set the roadmap and priorities for workstreams in your area, and lead the planning, design, and delegation of key components to individual contributors and stakeholders.
• Spot gaps, dependencies, and open problems, and work with customers and stakeholders to resolve them.
• Refine technical requirements proactively with key stakeholders.
• Work autonomously and deliver high-quality work on schedule.
• Split complex roadmaps into clear workstreams, milestones, and timelines, and build alignment across product managers, technical program managers, engineering managers, tech leads, individual contributors, and dependent teams.
• Present your team's roadmap and dependencies in company-wide initiatives.
• Coach and mentor tech leads and individual contributors, help design interview loops, and build coaching plans that close talent gaps.
• Resolve conflicts, build stakeholder buy-in, and remove blockers so projects ship on time.
• Demonstrate the company's core values and give feedback that improves team culture.

Requirements

• 10+ years of professional backend software development, focused on scalable distributed systems, data management, identity, security, or related areas.
• Strong grasp of distributed systems fundamentals: consistency models, partitioning and sharding, replication, consensus, and failure modes at scale.
• Understanding of graph database internals, including traversal algorithms, query planning and optimisation, and indexing strategies. Querying an existing graph API alone does not meet this.
• Systems-level Go: concurrency patterns, memory and performance tuning, and production experience building and testing backend services.
• Schema design for large graphs with high cardinality and fan-out.
• Experience designing and building RESTful APIs in microservice architectures.
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and with containers and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Familiarity with caching in distributed systems.
• A track record of technical decisions that affect the whole organisation, not only work inside an assigned scope.
• Experience setting technical direction or standards that multiple teams adopt.
• Experience designing systems for correctness and safe rollback in high-stakes infrastructure. Access and identity data counts.
• Fluency with AI-assisted engineering, using LLM tools such as Claude Code, Copilot, or similar for design exploration, code review, debugging, and documentation. You know when generated output can be trusted and when to verify it against source, tests, or runtime behaviour.
• Experience building or substantially modifying a storage or query engine, such as Neo4j internals or a comparable engine.
• Deep knowledge of relational algebra and graph algorithms, with experience across OLTP and OLAP systems.
• A record of using AI tools to multiply your and your team's output on large, complex codebases, well beyond autocomplete.
• Knowledge of identity and access management concepts such as RBAC, ABAC, permission graphs, and entitlement modelling.
• Background in security or compliance-adjacent engineering.
• Graduate degree.
• You solve problems rigorously and verify assumptions instead of guessing. You check logs, code, and system behaviour before proposing a fix, and you are willing to be wrong in public if it reaches the right answer faster.
• You handle ambiguity well. You can turn a vague mandate, such as making graph queries faster or hardening a system for scale, into a scoped plan with clear tradeoffs, then carry it out on your own and know when to bring others in.
• You think like a systems engineer. Before changing critical infrastructure you weigh blast radius and reversibility, since a subtle bug in the access graph has real security consequences.
• You communicate clearly with both engineers and product managers. You can explain why a traversal algorithm is O(n²) and why that affects customer-facing latency, without losing precision or talking down to either audience.
• You use AI as a tool, not a crutch. It helps you move faster through exploration, boilerplate, and first drafts, but you own the correctness of what ships and can tell a confident-sounding answer from a verified one.
• You review AI-generated output the way you would review a junior engineer's pull request: useful and often good, but checked with the same rigour as any other change before it reaches production.
• You make the team more effective, not only yourself. You review code as a teaching opportunity, pair when it helps someone grow, and measure your impact partly by how the engineers around you develop.
• You leave things better than you found them, improving documentation, test coverage, runbooks, and team practices as you go.
• You are low-ego and high-trust. You can disagree strongly in a design review and then fully back the decision once it is made.
• You are easy to work with, including during a 2am incident.

Conditions

Base pay for this role in this location is $176,100 - $308,200. Equity (where applicable) and variable or incentive pay are on top of base pay.

Sales roles generally include an On Target Earnings (OTE) incentive structure.

The base pay shown is a guideline. Individual pay depends on qualifications, skill level, competencies, and work location.

Pay is set by the geographic location where the role sits and may change with work location.

Work personas are flexible, remote, or required in office. The company assigns one based on the nature of the work and the work location.

To confirm eligibility for a work persona, the company may use a third-party service to measure the distance between your home and the nearest company office.

Benefits

• Health plans, including flexible spending accounts.
• 401(k) plan with company match.
• Employee stock purchase plan (ESPP).
• Matching donations.
• Flexible time-away plan.
• Family leave programs.