Staff Software Engineer, Traffic
About The Position
The Traffic team builds and operates critical traffic infrastructure that enables communication among thousands of services across multiple regions, as well as ingress systems for external traffic entering DoorDash’s platform. The Staff Software Engineer will help develop the next generation of DoorDash’s Traffic platform, working on core components including the Envoy Data Plane, xDS control planes, and proxyless architecture. This role sits at the intersection of distributed systems, networking, and large-scale infrastructure. It involves designing, building, and maintaining systems that operate reliably and efficiently across critical, latency-sensitive workloads. The position is hybrid, based at an engineering hub in the San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, or New York, and reports to the Engineering Manager of the Traffic Team within the Infrastructure organization.
Requirements
- 8 or more years of experience as a software engineer in infrastructure, networking, or platform engineering.
- Experience with programming languages such as Go, C++, Python, or Rust.
- Experience with AWS and Kubernetes.
- Background working on and debugging high-QPS or latency-sensitive systems.
- Curiosity, independence, ambition, and the ability to make progress in ambiguous and challenging environments.
- Proficiency using AI coding tools such as Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor throughout the software development lifecycle, including design, code generation, testing, monitoring, and release.
Nice To Haves
- Experience with service mesh technologies such as Envoy, Istio, or Linkerd.
- Familiarity with xDS or control plane architectures.
- Solid understanding of networking fundamentals such as TCP/IP, HTTP, HTTP/2, gRPC, and load balancing.
- Experience building RPC frameworks or client-side networking libraries.
- Experience with AWS networking primitives such as load balancers and PrivateLink.
- Experience with Infrastructure as Code tooling such as Terraform.
- Experience with GitOps delivery tooling such as ArgoCD, Helm, or Atlantis.
Responsibilities
- Design and build large-scale distributed systems that handle high request rates and latency-sensitive workloads.
- Troubleshoot, debug, and resolve production issues while maintaining service-level agreements.
- Collaborate with platform and product engineers to deliver feature requests and solve their problems.
- Improve team productivity and operational capabilities through automation, AI tools, and other approaches.
- Participate in a shared on-call and support rotation and lead production investigations and incidents.
- Build and maintain Traffic platform components, including the Envoy Data Plane, xDS control planes, and proxyless architecture.
Benefits
- 401(k) plan with employer matching.
- 16 weeks of paid parental leave.
- Wellness benefits.
- Commuter benefits match.
- Paid time off and paid sick leave.
- Medical, dental, and vision benefits.
- 11 paid holidays.
- Disability and basic life insurance.
- Family-forming assistance.
- Mental health program.
- Equity grant opportunities.
- For salaried roles, flexible paid time off/vacation and 80 hours of paid sick time per year.
Stand Out From the Crowd
Upload your resume and get instant feedback on how well it matches this job.
What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
