Staff Software Engineer, Storage - Taulu

DoorDash USA•Seattle, WA

2d•$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 Distributed Key Value team owns the storage platform that powers business-critical workloads across DoorDash, Wolt, and Deliveroo. These systems sit on the Tier-0 critical path. They serve millions of QPS across multiple regions and underpin how hundreds of engineering teams build reliable systems at massive scale. DoorDash's storage abstraction platform is a unified data-access layer that sits in front of our databases and decouples application teams from the underlying storage engines, similar to modern data-gateway and key-value / time-series data-abstraction platforms. Nearly every request that touches persistent data flows through it. As DoorDash scales 10x–100x across new verticals, global expansion, and acquisitions, this platform is where the hardest distributed-storage problems live — latency at the tail, request routing, and reliability under exponential load. We're hiring a Staff Software Engineer to be the domain specialist for the storage abstraction platform: a deep, opinionated technical leader who owns the reliability, performance, and correctness of the platform at scale, sets its technical direction, and raises the execution bar across the storage organization.

Requirements

10+ years building large-scale distributed systems, with deep expertise in at least one Tier 0 storage / data-plane system (distributed KV, database internals, caching, or a storage proxy/control plane).
Experience with storage abstraction layers or data-access gateways that decouple applications from the underlying databases — e.g., data-gateway or key-value / time-series data-abstraction platforms, or comparable in-house systems. Deep experience building or operating a large-scale distributed data store — such as DynamoDB, RocksDB, or ZippyDB — is an equally strong fit.
Expertise in low-latency, high-throughput systems — tail-latency optimization, hot-partition and load balancing/routing, backpressure, and failure isolation.
Strong Go experience in production distributed systems.
Deep, hands-on grasp of storage internals: MVCC, GC/compaction, consistency models, replication, and/or CDC.
Proven ownership of Tier 0 / mission-critical services — on-call leadership, incident resolution under ambiguity, and capacity and performance work at scale.
Demonstrated Staff-level technical leadership: setting direction across teams, acting as a force multiplier, and driving org-wide architectural decisions.
Kubernetes and cloud-native infrastructure; strong observability instincts (metrics, tracing, profiling).
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

Cassandra (or comparable wide-column/NoSQL) internals and operations.
Built client/SDK, code-generation, or provider/abstraction layers across polyglot clients.
Open-source contributions to storage, database, or distributed-systems projects.

Responsibilities

Own the reliability, performance, and correctness of the storage abstraction platform at scale, independently leading resolution of mission-critical issues in ambiguous, high-pressure situations.
Set technical direction for the platform — the storage abstraction and data-access layer, provider model, caching, and routing — owning the architecture, quality, and long-term approach as it scales.
Work deep in the data plane — proxy, KV, CDC, and routing — on the problems that define a Tier 0 system: p99/p999 latency, request routing, hot partitions, GC/MVCC behavior, and failure isolation.
Shape the client surface — thin/thick providers, polyglot code generation, and SDKs — that connects application services to the platform.
Act as a force multiplier and trusted technical advisor: raise the execution and quality bar for your team and partners, mentor senior engineers, and influence roadmaps beyond your immediate scope.
Take end-to-end ownership of the platform lifecycle — guiding customers from onboarding through adoption, driving the offering forward and expanding its impact.
Design and operate systems built for 100x growth, proactively engineering for exponential load rather than reacting to it, and eliminating single points of failure through documentation, automation, and shared ownership.
Translate ambiguous business needs into durable, storage-owned solutions, and be an opinionated domain expert on how storage problems are best solved.