Staff Engineer Distributed Storage and Transaction

YugabyteDB•Sunnyvale, CA

10d•$150,000 - $250,000•Hybrid

About The Position

As a Staff Engineer on the Distributed Storage & Transactions (DST) team, you will play a critical role in designing, building, and scaling the core distributed storage, replication, and transaction foundations of YugabyteDB. You will work on some of the most challenging problems in distributed systems — including consistency, durability, fault tolerance, performance, and scalability — while collaborating closely with query layer, platform, and cloud teams. This role is ideal for engineers who thrive in low-level systems work and want to shape the future of a globally distributed database.

Requirements

8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a strong foundation in systems programming using C/C++.
Bachelor’s, Master’s, or PhD in Computer Science (or related field), or equivalent practical experience.
Deep understanding of distributed systems fundamentals, including: Replication and consensus, Transactions and consistency models, Fault tolerance and recovery
Experience working on storage engines, databases, or other infrastructure-level systems.
Strong problem-solving skills and the ability to operate effectively in a collaborative, distributed team environment

Nice To Haves

Hands-on experience with distributed storage systems, transactional engines, or consensus protocols.
Familiarity with LSM-tree based storage engines, WALs, snapshots, or compaction strategies.
Experience with PostgreSQL internals or other relational database engines is a strong plus.
Prior contributions to open-source systems or database projects.

Responsibilities

Lead the design, development, testing, and delivery of core storage and replication features in YugabyteDB.
Write high-quality C/C++ code with comprehensive automated tests; actively participate in design discussions and code reviews.
Troubleshoot and resolve correctness, stability, and performance issues in complex distributed storage and transactional subsystems.
Improve database scalability and throughput as cluster sizes, data volumes, and transaction rates continue to grow.
Build and streamline database management operations, including: Horizontal cluster scale-out, Incremental and point-in-time backups, Online schema and index operations, Rolling upgrades and blue-green deployments
Identify and implement performance improvements across the storage engine, transaction processing, and replication layers.
Contribute to the open-source YugabyteDB project, helping evolve its storage architecture and operational reliability.
Mentor and technically influence other engineers in distributed systems design, performance engineering, and systems-level debugging.