Distinguished Engineer

The role:

We are looking for a Distinguished Engineer based in our Paris office to lead the technical transformations that are too large, too cross-cutting, or too critical to belong to a single engineering team.

This is a company-wide IC role with direct report to the CTO and explicit authority to drive major technical decisions across Product Engineering, Platform, Infrastructure and Data.

This isn't an advisory role, it's a mandate to change how Brevo Engineering works at a foundational level.

What you will do:

You will own a small number of high-impact technical transformations end to end: architecture, implementation strategy, migration, adoption and retirement of legacy systems.

Examples include:

• rebuilding our CI/CD and deployment architecture across hundreds of services and repositories;
• replacing fragmented logging and observability patterns with an OpenTelemetry-based platform backed by ClickHouse;
• redesigning how we use Kafka and introducing stronger platform abstractions around messaging;
• turning ClickHouse into a first-class internal product rather than a database consumed inconsistently across teams;
• defining and driving common standards around service communication, reliability, runtime architecture and developer platforms.

These initiatives will cross organizational boundaries and require changes to both infrastructure and application code.

Your responsibility is to own the projects end to end, driving them through every stage and resolving whatever obstacles arise until it is delivered.

Who you are:

• You have already operated at Principal, Distinguished, Senior Principal, Fellow, or equivalent level within a significantly larger engineering organization.
• You have repeatedly led transformations involving
• hundreds of engineers or large service fleets,
• distributed systems and production infrastructure,
• complex migrations where old and new worlds had to coexist,
• strong technical disagreement across senior teams,
• and architecture decisions with broad and lasting consequences.
• You move fluidly between a system design discussion, a code review, a production incident, a migration plan, and an executive-level technical decision.
• You bring deep expertise in several of the following: Kubernetes, CI/CD, Kafka, ClickHouse, OpenTelemetry, distributed databases, service communication, developer platforms, and large-scale observability.