Staff Software Engineer, Event Streaming Systems

DoorDash USA•New York, NY

14h•$193,800 - $285,000•Hybrid

About The Position

The Storage organization builds and operates the online stateful systems and abstractions that DoorDash Engineering depends on: reliable, efficient, secure, and easy to use. Within Storage, the Event Streaming Systems team owns the event streaming platform that powers business-critical, event-driven workflows across DoorDash, Wolt, and Deliveroo, including Kafka, our event streaming abstraction layer (internally called Event Bus), and the next generation of streaming platform technologies. These systems sit on the Tier-0 critical path. They move trillions of events per day across multiple regions and underpin how hundreds of engineering teams build reliable, event-driven products at massive scale. We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer to set the technical direction for our event streaming platform and lead its evolution over the next several years. This is a senior individual-contributor role: you'll operate as a force multiplier across teams, owning the hardest architectural problems, driving org-wide technical strategy, and raising the engineering bar for everyone who builds on and operates streaming infrastructure. You'll go deep on the internals of modern streaming systems, from the Kafka protocol and storage engine to object-store-backed, diskless architectures like WarpStream and AutoMQ. You'll make the high-leverage bets that determine how DoorDash streams data for years to come, on a platform that serves hundreds of engineering teams and trillions of events per day. You must be located in the New York Metro Area for this hybrid position. You will report to the Engineering Manager on our Event Streaming Systems team within the Storage organization.

Requirements

Deep 8+ years of hands-on experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems in production, with a track record of technical leadership across multiple teams or an organization.
Operated event streaming systems such as Kafka at scale, and you understand their internals, including the log storage engine, the ISR replication model, metadata consensus (KRaft/ZooKeeper), the consumer/producer protocol, partitioning, and rebalancing.
Strong engineer in Java, Go, or a similar language, with deep expertise in concurrency, distributed systems, and building reliable, maintainable production infrastructure.
Led high-impact, cross-team initiatives from ambiguous problems to shipped outcomes, and you can influence technical direction across an organization without relying on authority.
Strong fundamentals in Linux, networking, storage, and JVM-based systems, and you use them to reason about performance and failure modes from first principles.
Understand the trade-offs of object-store-backed streaming, including write-path latency versus cost, cross-AZ network cost avoidance, the separation of compute and storage, and object metadata and caching design.
Communicate with clarity and can bring engineers, managers, and leaders along on complex technical decisions and trade-offs.
Proficiency in using AI coding tools (e.g., Claude Code, Codex, Cursor) in the full software development lifecycle, including designing, generating code, testing, monitoring and releasing software

Nice To Haves

Experience with the internals of object-store-backed or diskless streaming architectures such as WarpStream or AutoMQ, or with tiered storage in Kafka.
Contributions to Kafka or related open-source distributed systems (Pulsar, Redpanda, or similar).
Experience with broker and JVM tuning, partition management, or Cruise Control at large scale.
Experience designing multi-region streaming platforms and reasoning about their consistency, durability, and cost trade-offs.
Experience leading migrations of Tier-0 infrastructure with zero customer-visible impact.
Experience driving significant efficiency or cost wins on large streaming or storage fleets.

Responsibilities

Set the multi-year technical vision and architecture for DoorDash's event streaming platform, and drive alignment in that direction across Storage, SRE, Data Platform, and Product Engineering.
Lead the largest and most ambiguous streaming initiatives end to end, such as re-architecting toward diskless, object-store-backed streaming to cut cost and operational overhead across the fleet.
Go deep on the internals of Kafka and modern streaming systems (WarpStream, AutoMQ, and similar), and use that depth to solve problems that block the rest of the organization.
Own architectural decisions with company-wide blast radius, from replication, consensus, and storage design to multi-region topology, capacity, and cost efficiency.
Debug and resolve the hardest distributed systems problems in production, including subtle correctness, performance, and reliability issues under Tier-0 constraints.
Raise the technical bar through design reviews, mentorship of senior engineers, and by establishing the standards and patterns others build on.
Partner with engineering leadership to shape roadmaps, make build-versus-buy and open-source-versus-managed decisions, and translate business needs into platform strategy.