Senior Infra Engineer - Events Platform (Americas)

About The Role

The Identity & Events Platform team sits at the heart of how Shopify moves data. The Event Refinery sub-team is building the next-generation event processing platform that will replace Shopify's legacy eventing infrastructure, becoming the central hub through which all merchant, buyer, and third-party event data flows. The systems this team builds power personalization, recommendations, advertising, internal and external analytics, partner data sharing, and automations. The team is now scaling from roughly 10 billion events per day toward hundreds of billions as Shopify migrates teams onto the new platform. That is the problem you would be joining to help solve.

What You'll Work On

• Design, build, and operate high-throughput streaming pipelines that process behavioral event data at massive scale
• Ensure compliance and correctness in how event data is enriched, routed, and made available to downstream consumers
• Improve pipeline reliability and observability including latency, memory optimization, Kafka throughput, and operational health
• Collaborate with downstream teams (i.e. personalization, analytics, advertising, etc) to evolve the platform to meet their data needs
• Participate in on-call rotations and own the operational health of production systems

Requirements

• Proven experience building and operating high-throughput data processing systems in production at meaningful scale
• Proficiency in Java or a similar JVM/statically-typed language (Kotlin, Scala, Go, Rust) — our streaming pipelines are written in Java and you should be comfortable working in it or ramping up quickly
• Hands-on experience with Apache Flink or a comparable stream processing framework (Dataflow, Spark Streaming)
• Working knowledge of Apache Kafka including producing, consuming, tuning throughput, and understanding operational behavior under load
• Operational mindset — you have been on-call, you think about latency and memory, and you know how to run a production system, not just write code for one
• Kubernetes familiarity in a production context — running workloads and owning their reliability

Strong signals we look for

• Experience with behavioral or event data pipelines rather than transactional or reporting-focused data
• Observability work including metrics, alerting, tracing, and reducing noise in production systems
• Latency optimization and compression work on streaming or storage systems
• Complex pipeline work such as aggregations, rollups, and enrichment beyond simple data-in/data-out

Nice to have

• Interest in data privacy and compliance at the processing layer: how to correctly aggregate, route, and act on data given consent and governance signals
• Experience at companies or platforms that treat behavioral data as a core product

What This Role Is Not

This is not a data engineering role in the analytics sense. If SQL is your primary tool, this probably is not the right fit. We are looking for engineers who build the infrastructure that makes data move, not the models or dashboards that sit on top of it.

About Shopify

Opportunity is not evenly distributed. Shopify puts independence within reach for anyone with a dream to start a business. We propel entrepreneurs and enterprises to scale the heights of their potential. Since 2006, we've grown to over 8,300 employees and generated over $1 trillion in sales for millions of merchants in 175 countries. This is life-defining work that directly impacts people's lives as much as it transforms your own. This is putting the power of the few in the hands of the many, is a future with more voices rather than fewer, and is creating more choices instead of an elite option.

About You

Moving at our pace brings a lot of change, complexity, and ambiguity—and a little bit of chaos. Shopifolk thrive on that and are comfortable being uncomfortable. That means Shopify is not the right place for everyone. Before you apply, consider if you can:

• Care deeply about what you do and about making commerce better for everyone
• Excel by seeking professional and personal hypergrowth
• Keep up with an unrelenting pace (the week, not the quarter)
• Be resilient and resourceful in face of ambiguity and thrive on (rather than endure) change
• Bring critical thought and opinion
• Put AI agents and tools to work on the tasks they're built for, and focus on the work only humans can do
• Embrace differences and disagreement to get shit done and move forward
• Work digital-first for your daily work