Staff Distributed Systems Engineer - Collaboration

At Webflow, we’re building the world’s leading AI-native Digital Experience Platform, and we’re doing it as a remote‑first company built on trust, transparency, and a whole lot of creativity. This work takes grit, because we move fast, without ever sacrificing craft or quality. Our mission is to bring development superpowers to everyone. From entrepreneurs launching their first idea 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’re here to build it together.

About the role:

• Location: Remote‑first (United States; BC & ON, Canada)
• Full-time Permanent Exempt
• Compensation: base pay is tailored to geographic market.

• United States – Zone A: $187,000 – $289,000
• United States – Zone B: $175,000 – $271,000
• United States – Zone C: $164,000 – $254,000
• Canada (Ontario & BC) – $212,000 – $328,000

Eligible to participate in Webflow’s company‑wide bonus program. Reporting to the Senior Manager, Engineering.

Responsibilities:

• 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.
• Lead architecture for distributed services at scale that synchronize shared state across clients with correctness guarantees (ordering, idempotency, convergence). These services require low latency, high availability, with a 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 standardization that increases leverage.
• Deliver maintainable, tested, performant systems and evolve them with a “crawl, walk, run” plan.
• Use modern tooling (agentic coding, debugging, code review) to improve developer velocity and reduce time‑to‑diagnosis in production.
• Participate in engineering citizenship activities such as co‑authoring engineering blogs, improving hiring processes, and leading internal hackathon teams.

Qualifications:

• BA/BS degree or equivalent experience.
• At least 7, preferably 10+ years of building and operating large‑scale production distributed systems focused on latency, correctness, and reliability (99.99% uptime).
• Deep backend systems experience in one or more modern server environments (Java, Go, Rust, Python, Node.js, etc.), with ability to ramp quickly in new stacks.
• Expertise in distributed systems, concurrency, scaling, and debugging multi‑layer systems.
• Strong operational judgment: define SLIs/SLOs, build observability, improve systems via incidents and feedback loops.
• Staff behaviors: lead multi‑team initiatives, write design docs, influence architecture beyond immediate team, communicate across organization.
• Ability to make decisions with incomplete information and move with urgency while keeping critical code operational.
• Curiosity and openness to growth; actively build fluency in emerging technologies like AI.

Benefits & Core Behaviors:

• Build lasting customer trust.
• Win together.
• Reinvent ourselves.
• Deliver with speed, quality, and craft.
• Ownership: equity through RSUs.
• Health coverage for employees and dependents.
• Family life support: 12 weeks paid parental leave for all parents, 6+ weeks additional for birthing parents; inclusive care for family planning, menopause, midlife transitions.
• Time off: flexible vacation, paid holidays, sabbatical program.
• Wellness: mental health resources, therapy, coaching.
• Retirement: 401(k) with 100% employer match up to $6,000/year.
• Local monthly stipends for work and wellness expenses.
• Annual WIN bonus program eligibility.

Equal Opportunity:

At Webflow, equity, inclusion, and diversity are core values. We are an Equal Opportunity Employer, Veterans/Disabled, and we do not discriminate on any protected characteristic. We consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records as required by the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance. We provide reasonable accommodation for individuals with disabilities during the application and interview process.