Estuary is simplifying how the world moves data so teams can build, adapt, and innovate without limits.

Estuary Flow is a real-time data integration platform built for both fast-moving developers and large-scale enterprises.  It combines change data capture, stream processing, and declarative configuration into a unified system that simplifies complex data movement.  With Flow, teams can build reliable, low-latency pipelines across systems – without the overhead of managing data infrastructure.  

As a senior backend engineer, you’ll work on high-impact, technically challenging projects – from performance-critical stream processing to scaling our infrastructure and evolving our developer experience.  This role will be part of our integrations team but there is room to rotate and contribute wherever your skills have the most impact.  

You’ll join a high-trust, high-impact team, and help shape core parts of our backend — from system architecture and performance optimization to enabling developers to build and deploy integrations quickly and reliably.

What You’ll Do

• Design, implement, deploy, test, and maintain substantial projects primarily written in Python.
  
• Lead technical initiatives around distributed systems, fault tolerance, and performance optimization
  
• Help shape our connector framework and build the tools that allow data to flow in real time from hundreds of APIs and databases
  
• Contribute to architectural decisions that improve scalability, maintainability, and developer experience
  
• Work closely with founders, product leadership, and other engineers to scope and deliver meaningful product improvements
  
• Write production-grade code, participate in code reviews, and mentor teammates
  
  

What We’re Looking For

• 5+ years of industry experience in backend software development, ideally working with distributed systems, stream processing, or real-time infrastructure
  
• Proficiency in Go and Python is preferred, with a willingness to learn new technologies.  Experience with Rust is a plus!
  
• Comfort building complex systems with a focus on performance and correctness
  
• Interest in developer experience and building tools that make engineers more effective
  
• Clear communication skills and a track record of successful cross-functional collaboration
  
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience
  

Bonus Points For

• Experience with change data capture (CDC), event streaming, or data integration tools (e.g., Airbyte, Fivetran, Debezium)
  
• Contributions to open source projects, especially in the data ecosystem
  
• Background working in early-stage startups or fast-moving engineering teams
  
• Familiarity with cloud-native infrastructure (GCP, AWS)
  

Why Estuary?

Estuary is VC-backed and led by experienced, repeat founders. We're a small but growing team that values ownership, fast iteration, and helping each other level up.

We offer:

• Competitive compensation, equity, and full benefits
  
• Flexible remote work (with hybrid options in NYC)
  
• A strong engineering culture with low ego and high autonomy
  
• Quarterly team offsites in fun locations like Miami, Austin, Boulder, and New Orleans

As a Solutions Engineer at Estuary, you’ll work directly with our founding team to help companies unlock the power of their real-time data. Your work will directly shape how users harness their real-time data, driving our product's development and creating seamless user experiences.

Working at the intersection of engineering, product, and customers, this role offers the unique opportunity to influence Estuary’s product roadmap while ensuring a smooth and impactful experience for our users.

We’re looking for individuals with an insatiable curiosity to dive into technical challenges and an empathetic approach to making complex concepts accessible to others. This role is perfect for someone who thrives in a startup environment and seeks the freedom to implement ideas without the constraints of a larger company.

As a Solutions Engineer, you’ll play a crucial role in shaping the trajectory of a growing company, with the flexibility to chart your path and take your career to the next level.

Responsibilities:

• Focus on solving specific customer pain points to create a seamless end-to-end experience.
• Lead discovery of user challenges, translating insights into actionable product strategies.
• Develop technical documentation of customer requirements and maintain internal resources.
• Actively engage in user-support channels, addressing questions and issues raised by Flow users.
• Provide hands-on technical support, conducting independent investigations when needed.
• Build strong relationships with customers to act as a trusted conduit, influencing their data strategy.
• Develop a perspective on customer and market trends, sharing insights directly with our founding team to influence product direction.
• Gather and articulate technical feature requests to improve product alignment with customer needs.
  

What We’re Looking For:

• Takes ownership of global customer requests, recognizing that timely support across timezones enables customer success and helps Estuary grow.
• You're deeply committed to building at a fast-paced startup, far beyond a typical 9 to 5 job.
• Bachelor's degree in computer science, data science, or related field, or equivalent technical and business experience.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills.
• Strong interpersonal and relationship-building abilities.
• A natural teacher with empathy for technical and non-technical users, and a genuine desire to make complex topics accessible.
• Solid understanding and hands-on experience with two or more programming languages (e.g., Python, SQL, JavaScript) or equivalent technical skills.
• Experience collaborating effectively with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Ability to balance customer-centric thinking with strong technical expertise.
• Experience working in startup environments is strongly preferred.

Why Estuary?

• Collaborative, ambitious, high performing team that’s passionate about data and pushing the envelope in technology.
• Early-stage startup: your limit is your imagination, not your job description.
• Remote-first culture with autonomy: work flexibly from anywhere.
• Quarterly offsite meetings in fun locations like Miami, Boulder, and Austin.  Getting to know each other as a team is crucial to our success! 
• Competitive salary, equity, and benefits package.

If you’re passionate about solving complex problems, helping customers succeed, and building for scale, we’d love to hear from you!

Backend Engineer

Estuary is seeking an enthusiastic and talented Software Engineer to join our dynamic team and contribute to the development of our cutting-edge data integration platform.

This role is focused on extending our capability to create connectors to various systems.  The integration team develops connectors which move data in real-time between a multitude of sources and destinations and we’re looking for an engineer to help us efficiently scale the process of creating them by enhancing systems and frameworks to make connector development easier.

What You'll Do

• Design, implement, deploy, test, and maintain substantial projects primarily written in Python.
  
• Develop data integration connectors for capturing data from various external APIs, becoming a subject matter expert in extracting data from these systems.
  
• Identify common patterns used in data extraction from APIs and build abstractions to streamline connector development.
  
• Participate in designing and developing large-scale distributed systems for seamless data exchange.
  
• Write code, participate in reviews, troubleshoot, and debug technical issues.
  
• Stay updated on current technologies and data processing advancements.

What We're Looking For

• 3+ years of relevant industry experience or equivalent proficiency gained through internships, coursework, or personal projects.
  
• Proficiency in Python is preferred, with a willingness to learn new technologies.
  
• Understanding of software development principles, debugging, and version control.
  
• Interest in data integration principles and real-time data processing.
  
• Strong problem-solving skills and ability to work both independently and collaboratively.
  
• Effective written and verbal communication skills.
  
• Bonus: Exposure to distributed systems and cloud environments, involvement in open-source communities, or experience in startup environments.

Level: Director
Location: Remote US
Reports to: CTO

What’s the role

Estuary powers “right-time” data replication and transform: from sub-second CDC replication to terabyte-scale OLAP data flows. We’re formalizing a Platform (foundational services) vs Applications (SaaS and technology integrations, transformation UX, AI enablement) structure across our team and technology stack, by hiring a Head of Applications Engineering to lead strategy, people, delivery, and operations as we transition from a flat team of generalists to durable, high-ownership pods. This role is a peer to the Head of Platform Engineering (founder CTO as interim).

What you’ll do

• Optimize project delivery. Develop processes and team loops that wrangle the competing needs of customers, partners, marketing, operations, and long-term product vision into a focused and achievable technical pipeline.
  
• Maintain SLOs. Manage application issue triage and response so that customer impacts are evaluated and resolved expeditiously. Safeguard Estuary’s “fix bugs first” culture and protect our reputation for customer support and success as we grow.
  
• Manage and nurture. Establish Estuary’s engineering management culture. Develop and organize the existing Applications team (a mix of early career through decades of experience), hire to meet scaling project needs, and tap your experience to layer the right structures and processes at the right time.
  
• Partner tightly. Work with the co-founders and leads for compliance, marketing, sales, and support to develop our shared roadmap, refine scope into clear engineering commitments, set expectations, sequence work, and surface risks.
  
• Operational excellence. Develop and champion quality standards and strategies for risk minimization. Improve development processes and experience.
  
• Hiring engine. Own the engineering candidate lifecycle: sourcing, screening, interview structure, scoring, and onboarding. Work with in-house recruiting to achieve sustainable growth of exceptional hires.
  
• Be a player‑coach. You’ll read design proposals, ask the right questions, build prototypes, and contribute code occasionally to stay on top of Estuary’s technology stack—this is not a pure people‑ops role, but requires honed judgement for “do” vs “delegate”.

Qualifications

• 8–12+ years in platform engineering with 3–5+ years leading teams; experience managing 8–20 engineers across 2–4 pods.
• Proven ability to lead, introduce structure, and nurture engineering excellence across multiple teams in a complex domain, preferably B2B.
• Evidence of hiring and leveling senior ICs and tech leads; manager‑of‑managers experience a plus.
• Ability to communicate at all levels, and discuss nuanced technical concepts with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Experience leading and organizing incident response in high stakes settings.
• Familiarity and interest in techniques for building data-intensive applications and platforms.

How we work

• High autonomy; engineers own the full feature lifecycle and often engage directly with users.
• Remote‑first, Slack‑centric, async‑friendly with VCs as needed
• Global team with a skew towards east-coast working hours

Compensation & leveling

Market‑competitive cash + equity.