Base Salary
$194k - $285k/yr
Responsibilities
- Set the multi-year technical vision and architecture for DoorDash’s event streaming platform and drive alignment across Storage, SRE, Data Platform, and Product Engineering.
- Lead major streaming initiatives, including potential migration toward diskless, object-store-backed architectures.
- Solve complex Kafka and modern streaming-system problems involving replication, consensus, storage, topology, capacity, correctness, performance, and reliability.
- Own architectural decisions with company-wide impact and debug the hardest production distributed-systems issues under Tier-0 constraints.
- Raise engineering standards through design reviews, mentorship, and reusable technical patterns.
- Partner with engineering leadership on roadmaps, build-versus-buy decisions, open-source-versus-managed choices, and platform strategy.
Requirements
- 8+ years of hands-on experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems in production.
- Experience operating event streaming systems such as Kafka at scale and understanding Kafka internals, including log storage, ISR replication, KRaft/ZooKeeper consensus, producer and consumer protocols, partitioning, and rebalancing.
- Strong engineering skills in Java, Go, or a similar language, with deep expertise in concurrency, distributed systems, and production infrastructure.
- Experience leading high-impact, cross-team initiatives from ambiguous problems to shipped outcomes and influencing technical direction without formal authority.
- Strong fundamentals in Linux, networking, storage, and JVM-based systems, including performance and failure-mode analysis.
- Understanding of object-store-backed streaming trade-offs, including latency, cost, cross-AZ networking, compute-storage separation, metadata, and caching.
- Clear communication skills for explaining complex technical decisions and trade-offs to engineers, managers, and leaders.
- Proficiency using AI coding tools such as Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor throughout the software development lifecycle.
- Preferred experience with WarpStream, AutoMQ, or Kafka tiered storage; contributions to Kafka, Pulsar, Redpanda, or similar open-source systems; broker or JVM tuning; Cruise Control; multi-region streaming platforms; Tier-0 migrations; or large-scale efficiency and cost improvements.
Benefits
- Hybrid position requiring location in the New York Metro Area.
- Comprehensive benefits including 401(k) matching, 16 weeks of paid parental leave, wellness and commuter benefits, paid time off and sick leave, medical, dental, and vision coverage, 11 paid holidays, disability and basic life insurance, family-forming assistance, and mental health support.
- Salaried employees receive flexible paid time off and 80 hours of paid sick time per year.
About DoorDash
At DoorDash, our mission to empower local economies shapes how our team members move quickly and always learn and reiterate to support merchants, Dashers and the communities we serve. We are a technology and logistics company that started with door-to-door delivery, and we are looking for team members who can help us go from a company that is known for delivering food to a company that people turn to for any and all goods. DoorDash is growing rapidly and changing constantly, which gives our team members the opportunity to share their unique perspectives, solve new challenges, and own their careers. Our leaders seek the truth and welcome big, hairy, audacious questions. We are grounded in our company values, and we make intentional decisions that are both logical and display empathy for our range of users—from Dashers to Merchants to Customers.