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, along with ingress systems for external traffic entering the DoorDash 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. The role involves designing, building, and maintaining reliable, efficient systems for critical and latency-sensitive workloads across a global infrastructure operating 24x7 without downtime. The position is hybrid and 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
- At least 8 years of experience as a software engineer in infrastructure, networking, or platform engineering.
- Experience with a programming language such as Go, C++, Python, or Rust.
- Experience with AWS and Kubernetes.
- A background working on and debugging high-QPS or latency-sensitive systems.
- Curiosity, independence, ambition, and the ability to find solutions and make progress in ambiguous, challenging environments.
- Proficiency using AI coding tools (such as Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor) throughout the software development lifecycle, including designing, generating code, testing, monitoring, and releasing software.
Nice To Haves
- Experience with service mesh technologies such as Envoy, Istio, or Linkerd.
- Familiarity with xDS or control plane architectures.
- A 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 tools such as Terraform.
- Experience with GitOps delivery tools such as ArgoCD, Helm, or Atlantis.
Responsibilities
- Design and build large-scale distributed systems that handle high request rates and are latency-sensitive.
- Troubleshoot, debug, and fix 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.
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 in compliance with applicable laws.
- Flexible paid time off/vacation and 80 hours of paid sick time per year for salaried roles.
- Medical, dental, and vision benefits.
- 11 paid holidays.
- Disability and basic life insurance.
- Family-forming assistance.
- Mental health program.
- Equity grant opportunities.
- Premium healthcare and wellness expense reimbursement.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
