Staff Distributed Systems Engineer

About Webflow

At Webflow, we’re building the world’s leading AI-native Digital Experience Platform. We operate as a remote-first company founded on trust, transparency, and creativity. This work demands grit, as we move quickly without sacrificing craft or quality. Our mission is to provide development superpowers to everyone. From entrepreneurs launching ideas to global enterprises scaling their digital presence, we empower teams to design, launch, and optimize for the web without barriers. We believe the future of the web, and work, is more open, more creative, and more equitable, and we are building it together.

About The Role: Staff Distributed Systems Engineer

Location: Remote-first (United States; BC & ON, Canada)Employment Type: Full-time Permanent Exempt

The cash compensation for this role is designed to align with the cost of labor in different geographic markets. Base pay ranges are structured into zones, with specific pay determined by geographic location, job-related experience, knowledge, qualifications, and skills.

• United States (all figures cited below are in USD and pertain to workers in the United States)
  • Zone A: $187,000 - $289,000
  • Zone B: $175,000 - $271,000
  • Zone C: $164,000 - $254,000
• Canada (figures cited below are in CAD and pertain to workers in ON & BC, Canada)
  • $212,000 - $328,000

This role is also eligible to participate in Webflow's company-wide bonus program. Target amounts are a percentage of base salary and vary by career level. Payouts are based on company performance against established financial and operational goals.

Application Information:Application deadline: applications accepted on an ongoing basis until position is closed and filledThis posting is for a new positionReporting to the Senior Manager, Engineering

As a Staff Distributed Systems Engineer, You’ll:

• Collaborate with exceptional engineers on building systems and services for the world's largest companies. This platform powers millions of production websites and supports massive scale, including over 1% of global Internet traffic and more than 10 billion monthly visits.
• Lead architecture for distributed services at scale that synchronize shared state across clients, including clear correctness guarantees (e.g., ordering, idempotence, convergence). These services require low latency and high availability, with SLO of 99.99% uptime.
• Define concurrency and conflict-resolution semantics for concurrent changes, including trade-offs and constraints.
• Design for failure: retries, partial outages, reconnection, and safe recovery paths, with explicit degradation behavior.
• Own operational excellence: define SLIs/SLOs, instrument tracing/metrics/logging, and drive reliability improvements through incident learning.
• Drive cross-team technical alignment via design docs and decision records; unblock execution across org boundaries.
• Raise the bar through design and code reviews, mentoring, and pragmatic standardization that increases leverage.
• Deliver maintainable, tested, performant systems and evolve them with a “crawl, walk, run” plan.
• Use modern tooling (including AI-assisted coding, debugging and code review) to improve developer velocity and reduce time-to-diagnosis in production.
• Participate in engineering citizenship activities such as co-authoring engineering blogs, strengthening and improving our hiring processes, and leading internal hackathon teams.

In addition to the responsibilities outlined above, at Webflow we will support you in identifying where your interests and development opportunities lie and we'll help you incorporate them into your role.

Requirements

About you:BA/BS degree or equivalent experience

You’ll thrive as a Staff Distributed Systems Engineer, if you:

• Have at least 7, preferably 10+ years of building and operating large-scale production distributed systems where latency, correctness, and reliability (99.99% uptime) are non-negotiable.
• Possess deep backend systems experience in one or more modern server environments (e.g., Java, Go, Rust, Python, Node.js, etc.), with the ability to ramp and adapt quickly in new stacks.
• Have expertise with distributed systems, concurrency, scaling, and debugging multi-layer systems.
• Exhibit strong operational judgment: you define SLIs/SLOs, build observability, and improve systems via incidents and feedback loops, not heroics.
• Demonstrate Staff behaviors: you lead multi-team initiatives, write decision-quality design docs, influence architecture beyond your immediate team, and communicate across the organization.
• Have the ability to make decisions with incomplete information, understand and communicate one-way vs. two-way doors, and move with urgency while keeping critical code operational.
• Stay curious and open to growth — actively building fluency in emerging technologies like AI to unlock creativity, accelerate progress, and amplify impact.

Our Core Behaviors

• Build lasting customer trust. We build trust by taking action that puts customer trust first.
• Win together. We play to win, and we win as one team. Success at Webflow isn't a solo act.
• Reinvent ourselves. We don't just improve what exists, we imagine what's possible.
• Deliver with speed, quality, and craft. We move fast because the moment demands it, and we do so without lowering the bar.

Benefits

• Ownership in what you help build. Every permanent Webflower receives equity (RSUs) in our growing, privately held company.
• Health coverage that actually covers you. Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision plans for full-time employees and their dependents, with Webflow covering most premiums.
• Support for every stage of family life. 12 weeks of paid parental leave for all parents and 6+ weeks of additional paid leave for birthing parents. Plus inclusive care for family planning, menopause, and midlife transitions.
• Time off that’s actually off. Flexible vacation, paid holidays, and a sabbatical program to help you recharge and come back inspired.
• Wellness for the whole you. Access to mental health resources, therapy and coaching.
• Invest in your future. A 401(k) with 100% employer match (up to $6,000/year) in the U.S., and support for retirement savings globally.
• Monthly stipends that flex with your life. Localized support for work and wellness expenses — from Wi-Fi to workouts.
• Bonus for building together. All full-time, permanent, non-commission employees are eligible for our annual WIN bonus program.

Temporary employees may be eligible for paid holiday and time off, statutory leaves of absence, and company-sponsored medical benefits depending on their Fixed Term Contract and their country/state of employment.

Key skills/competency

• Distributed Systems
• System Architecture
• Scalability
• Reliability Engineering
• Concurrency
• Latency Optimization
• Cloud Platforms
• Observability
• Software Engineering
• AI Integration