Senior Infrastructure Engineer - Streaming Services/Materialization Platform

Senior Infrastructure Engineer Streaming Services/Materialization Platform About the role Every write to Shopify's core databases—orders, inventory, product data—flows through the CDC and materialization pipelines this team owns. Downstream, that data powers Shop's delivery guarantees, merchant-facing search, and the LLM agents that answer questions about live commerce state. You'll evolve and operate this platform: the throughput it sustains, the freshness it can promise, and the databases it reads from. This role combines development and operations. You'll build and run the systems you work on; lead complex features to production, work directly with users, strengthen the resiliency of the systems you own, work with vendor and open source teams. You’ll navigate ambiguous technical problems together with the team—prototyping solutions, taking calculated risks, and building momentum when the path forward isn't fully clear. What you'll do Build and operate Shopify's CDC and Data Materialization platforms, ensuring they meet the throughput and reliability demands of Shopify's event-driven systems Solve complex production issues at scale and participate in on-call rotation Contribute back to open source and vendor codebases Lead execution on impactful projects in the team's charter Use and shape how the team uses AI for design, coding, and collaboration Collaborate cross-functionally with teams across Shopify, and external vendor dev teams Drive for engineering excellence, balancing operational strength and shipping features Communicate with diverse audiences (cross-team RFCs, leadership briefs, non-technical stakeholders) What you'll bring You don't have to fully cover this list. Ideally: Experience in (or strong interest to learn) streaming (Debezium, Kafka), processing (Flink) or database (Yugabyte, MySQL, BigQuery) technologies. Bonus: you've built or operated a CDC pipeline, worked inside a distributed database, or debugged a streaming system under production load. Good coding patterns in any language (Java or Go ideal) Experience operating large distributed systems at scale Bias to action and ability to move forward when faced with ambiguous problems Experience leading projects—scoping and structuring work, building momentum behind decisions, driving execution. 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. This role requires on-call work. Ready to build the backbone of Shopify? Join the team that's making commerce better for everyone.