Staff Data Platform Software Engineer (Veza)

Join Veza's Graph Data Platform team as a Staff Data Platform Software Engineer. In this role, you will design, improve, and maintain the code behind the Veza Access Graph, collaborating with cross-functional teams to shape the future of our products. You will provide technical leadership, set roadmaps and execution plans, and mentor team members. This is an exciting opportunity to contribute to a high-impact team while working with cutting-edge technologies.

- Act as the technical expert for the Veza Access Graph, identifying broad challenges and parsing them into initiatives the organization can execute against. - Set roadmap and prioritization for workstreams in your area; drive planning, design, and delegation of key components to individual contributors and stakeholders. - Coach and mentor team leads and individual contributors; help define interview loops, identify talent gaps, and build coaching plans to close them.

- Track record of technical decisions with org-wide blast radius — not just execution within an assigned mandate - A systems thinker who considers blast radius and reversibility before making changes to critical infrastructure — especially in a domain like ours, where a subtle bug in the access graph has real security consequences - Fluent with AI as a working tool, not a crutch — you use it to move faster through exploration, boilerplate, and first drafts, but you still own the correctness of what ships, and you can tell the difference between "the model sounds confident" and "this is actually verified." - Someone who thrives with ambiguity: you can take a vague mandate ("make the graph queries faster," "harden this for scale") and turn it into a scoped plan with clear tradeoffs, then execute it independently — while knowing exactly when to loop others in - 10+ years of professional backend software development experience, with a focus on scalable distributed systems, data management, identity, security, or related domains - Fluency with AI-assisted engineering — using LLM-based tools (Claude Code, Copilot, or similar) to accelerate design exploration, code review, debugging, and documentation, while knowing when to trust generated output versus verifying it against source, tests, or runtime behavior - Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and containerization / orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes) - A rigorous problem-solver who instinctively verifies assumptions rather than guessing — you dig into logs, code, and system behavior before proposing a fix, and you're comfortable being wrong in public if it gets the team to the right answer faster - Graph database internals — traversal algorithms, query planning/optimization, indexing strategies (not just querying an existing graph API) - Go at a systems-programming level — concurrency patterns, memory/performance tuning, and production experience building and testing backend services - Distributed systems fundamentals — consistency models, partitioning/sharding, replication, consensus, failure modes at scale - Someone who leaves things better than you found them: documentation, test coverage, runbooks, and team practices all improve because you touched them - Someone who treats AI-assisted output the same way you'd treat a junior engineer's PR — useful, often good, but reviewed with the same rigor as anything else before it touches production - A pleasure to work with — even at 2am during an incident - Experience setting technical direction or standards adopted by multiple teams - You Are: - Low-ego and high-trust — you can disagree strongly in a design review and still buy the team a round after it's decided - Systems design for correctness and rollback safety in high-stakes infrastructure (access/identity data qualifies) - Large-scale data modeling — schema design for graphs handling high cardinality/fan-out - Experience designing and implementing RESTful APIs in microservice architectures - Familiarity with caching mechanisms in distributed systems - A mentor who multiplies the team's effectiveness, not just your own — you review code like you're teaching, you pair when it helps someone level up, and you measure your impact partly by how the engineers around you grow - A strong communicator who can explain why a traversal algorithm is O(n²) to another engineer and why that matters for customer-facing latency to a product manager — without losing precision or condescending to either audience - Storage engine or query engine experience — having built or deeply modified one (Neo4j internals or a comparable engine) - Graduate degree - Security or compliance-adjacent engineering background - Identity and access management concepts (RBAC/ABAC, permission graphs, entitlement modeling) - Track record of using AI tools to multiply personal and team output on complex, large-codebase work — beyond autocomplete-level usage - Deep knowledge of relational algebra and graph algorithms, with experience across OLTP and OLAP systems