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. We're looking for a Staff Distributed Systems Engineer About the role: • Location: Remote-first (United States; BC & ON, Canada) • Full-time • Permanent • Exempt • The cash compensation for this role is tailored to align with the cost of labor in different geographic markets. We've structured the base pay ranges for this role into zones for our geographic markets, and the specific base pay within the range will be determined by the candidate's 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. Please visit our Careers page for more information on which locations are included in each of our geographic pay zones. However, please confirm the zone for your specific location with your recruiter. • Application Information: • Application deadline: applications accepted on an ongoing basis until position is closed and filled • This posting is for a new position • Reporting 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 (eg: ordering, idempotency, 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. About you: Requirements: • BA/BS degree or equivalent experience You'll thrive as a Staff Distributed Systems Engineer, if you: • 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. • 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. • Expertise with distributed systems, concurrency, scaling, and debugging multi-layer systems. • Strong operational judgment: you define SLIs/SLOs, build observability, and improve systems via incidents and feedback loops, not heroics. • Staff behaviors: you lead multi-team initiatives, write decision-quality design docs, influence architecture beyond your immediate team, and communicate across the organization.. • Ability to make decisions with incomplete information,