Senior Software Engineer (Streaming and Durability)

Join Compass, a leading real estate technology company, as a Senior Software Engineer on the Streaming & Durability team. In this role, you will be responsible for designing and operating the foundational data layer that underpins Compass's core products. You will tackle complex challenges related to data isolation, database upgrades, streaming infrastructure, and observability. This is an opportunity to make a significant impact on the company's success and work with cutting-edge technology.

• Design and operate the database and caching fleet (RDS/Aurora PostgreSQL, ElastiCache Redis/ValKey, DynamoDB) that underpins Compass's core products.
• Build multi-tenant data isolation into Compass's data layer from the ground up, shipping SDKs in Go, Java, and Python that enforce tenant-safe access patterns.
• Build and scale Kafka/MSK streaming infrastructure, the connective tissue between Compass services, including topic architecture, consumer patterns, and blue/green deployment strategies.
• You think in trade-offs, not absolutes. You can articulate why you'd choose a soft application-enforced boundary over a hard infrastructure lock and when that calculus changes
• 5+ years of experience building and operating distributed systems, with depth in at least one major managed database (PostgreSQL or similar) at production scale in AWS
• You write Go (or can ramp quickly) and you're comfortable in Terraform, Kubernetes, and IAM-heavy AWS environments
• You've led cross-team operational programs ,including change management, migration coordination, and rollback planning, where the blast radius of a mistake extends well beyond your own team
• You've built shared tooling (SDKs, client libraries, platform APIs), and you understand what it takes to make infrastructure accessible and safe for engineers who aren't infrastructure specialists
• You've worked on multi-tenant isolation problems such as key prefixing, row-level security, and RBAC/ACL models and have opinions about where application-layer enforcement breaks down
• You've operated Kafka/MSK at scale and dealt with the hard parts: consumer lag, partition rebalancing, cross-account IAM auth
• You've built or contributed to observability platforms, specifically for database and cache monitoring