Senior Software Engineer, Capacity & Efficiency

Robinhood•Bellevue, WA

11d•$196,000 - $230,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Robinhood’s Capacity & Efficiency Engineering team builds software to manage, govern, and reduce AWS cloud spend across compute, databases, and storage. The team works across cloud infrastructure, data engineering, and FinOps, managing the full lifecycle of cloud cost—from attribution and forecasting to fleet-scale infrastructure rightsizing—while maintaining reliability and cost-effectiveness for a bursty, latency-sensitive trading platform. As a Senior Software Engineer, you will own capacity and efficiency for Robinhood’s storage and database fleet, including Aurora clusters, S3, caches, and volumes. You will build systems that size the fleet to demand, such as adjusting Aurora reader counts and writer sizes based on market hours, declared events, and live load; rightsizing databases, caches, and volumes; and managing S3 storage classes and lifecycle rules. You will take recommendations validated by the Storage team through to automation that safely applies changes in production. This is a 0-to-1 build with measurable impact on reliability during market peaks and AWS costs. The role is based in Robinhood’s Bellevue, Washington office, with in-person attendance expected at least three days per week.

Requirements

Deep hands-on experience operating AWS storage and databases at scale, especially Aurora or RDS (MySQL or PostgreSQL) and S3, including replication, read scaling, storage classes, and lifecycle management.
Experience with capacity planning and forecasting, including modeling time-series demand, load testing, and translating traffic into instance counts, sizes, and storage growth.
A track record of rightsizing infrastructure using utilization data such as CPU, memory, IOPS, throughput, and bytes stored without harming latency or availability.
Strong Python or Go engineering skills.
Experience building automation that safely modifies production infrastructure, with guardrails, progressive rollout, and rollback built in.

Nice To Haves

Familiarity with AWS storage and database pricing, including S3 storage classes and requests, Aurora I/O-Optimized versus Standard, and Reserved Instances.
Experience with bursty, event-driven workloads such as trading, payments, or ticketing.
Experience with Spark, Airflow, or Kubernetes.

Responsibilities

Build forecast-driven capacity planning for the storage and database fleet using traffic history, load tests, and known events, scaling capacity ahead of demand and reducing it afterward; include an expiry on every temporary capacity hold.
Design and build an Aurora capacity planner that sets reader counts and writer instance sizes from demand and load signals such as IOPS, CPU, connections, and replica lag, replacing fixed scaling schedules.
Rightsize databases, caches, and block storage, including RDS, ElastiCache, DynamoDB, and EBS, based on instance size, provisioned IOPS and throughput, and idle capacity; maintain appropriate sizing as load changes.
Manage S3 efficiency at scale, including storage-class and Intelligent-Tiering strategy, lifecycle and retention policies, noncurrent versions, incomplete uploads, and request costs, using Storage Lens and inventory data.
Turn recommendations into closed-loop automation with guardrails, progressive rollout, and rollback in partnership with the Storage infrastructure team.
Address operational constraints such as AWS capacity shortages, fallback instance types, and connection pooling.
Measure cost and reliability outcomes, including savings against baseline, forecast error, utilization, and capacity left behind after events.
Share forecasts with the pod rightsizing system so compute and storage scale together.

Benefits

Performance-driven compensation with multipliers for outsized impact.
Bonus programs.
Equity ownership.
401(k) matching.
100% paid health insurance for employees and 90% coverage for dependents.
A flexible lifestyle wallet benefits spending account for wellness, learning, and more.
Employer-paid life and disability insurance.
Fertility benefits.
Mental health benefits.
Company holidays, paid time off, sick time, and parental leave.
Catered meals, events, and comfortable workspaces.