SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
Aiven is a global cloud data platform company with over 400 employees, providing open-source databases, search, streaming, and application infrastructure across multi-cloud environments.
In this Staff Internal Product Engineer role, you will own the engineering system for Aiven's internal applications—a shared foundation that enables teams across Finance, People, GTM, Marketing, and Product Development to build and deploy applications safely, maintainably, and efficiently at scale.
You will directly own two critical systems: Aiven's hiring platform (built with TypeScript, React, Fastify, and PostgreSQL) and a shared credential gateway that provides controlled access to business systems. These serve as proving grounds for the shared engineering layer before broader adoption across the company.
Key responsibilities include:
• Evolving shared infrastructure into a supported, documented way to build, deploy, and operate internal applications and AI agents. Design patterns that AI coding agents can follow reliably alongside human engineers. Identify gaps, improve existing capabilities, and build reusable components that genuinely reduce duplicated work.
• Owning and developing central applications: the hiring platform and credential gateway. Drive their evolution as business needs change, working across application code, infrastructure, and production operations.
• Setting technical direction for internal applications across the company. Establish pragmatic engineering standards and architectural patterns for authentication, integrations, deployment, and operational concerns. Balance consistency with team flexibility. Review designs, set standards, and resolve conflicting technical approaches.
• Ensuring software is safe and reliable to operate. Own release paths, migrations, failure handling, and operational controls. Establish reusable approaches to security, access control, and unattended automation. Enforce important boundaries in code rather than relying on instructions alone.
• Enabling others to build independently. Work with non-engineer business functions to help them build and operate their own applications. Improve the development experience, remove technical bottlenecks, and establish patterns others can use without your involvement. Business functions own their applications' purpose; you're accountable for how fast, safe, and efficient it is to build and run them.
You'll join a small team based at Aiven's Helsinki headquarters, working in the office three days per week. Within two months, you'll have the first applications running in production on Aiven Runtime. Within six months, you'll have shipped key improvements and moved most actively developed applications onto the shared layer. Within a year, it becomes the default for all new builds.
As a Staff engineer, your impact is primarily outside your immediate team, with leverage coming through influence rather than authority.
REQUIREMENTS:
• Owned meaningful production software end to end, including operational responsibility when systems fail
• Strong software engineering depth with comfort owning infrastructure and production environments
• Influenced engineering decisions outside your immediate team through design review, mentoring, and standards-setting; other engineers trust the patterns you establish
• Use AI coding agents as a serious part of your development process; understand where they fail and have designed context, tests, permissions, and review boundaries to make agent-produced changes safe to ship
• Make architecture and product trade-offs under ambiguity, including deciding what not to build
• Typically 8+ years of building and operating software
NICE TO HAVE:
• Experience building internal developer platforms or shared foundations used by multiple teams
• TypeScript and React, Python, and PostgreSQL
• Identity and access control, or systems handling sensitive personal data
• Putting agents and unattended automation into production with technical controls
