Staff Software Engineer, Event Streaming Systems
$193,800–$285,000 year
HybridNew York, United States
Job Summary
Set the multi-year technical vision and architecture for DoorDash's event streaming platform, driving alignment across Storage, SRE, Data Platform, and Product Engineering. Lead end-to-end re-architecting of the system toward diskless, object-store-backed streaming to reduce fleet cost and operational overhead. Go deep on Kafka internals and modern architectures like WarpStream and AutoMQ to solve organization-wide correctness, performance, and reliability issues under Tier-0 constraints. Own architectural decisions with company-wide blast radius, including replication, consensus, multi-region topology, and capacity planning. Debug the hardest distributed systems problems in production and raise the technical bar through design reviews, mentorship, and establishing standards for others to build on. Partner with leadership to shape roadmaps, make build-versus-buy decisions, and translate business needs into platform strategy.
Required Qualifications
- Must be located in the New York Metro Area for this hybrid position
- 8+ years of hands-on experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems in production
- Track record of technical leadership across multiple teams or an organization
- Operated event streaming systems such as Kafka at scale
- Understanding of Kafka internals including log storage engine, ISR replication model, metadata consensus (KRaft/ZooKeeper), consumer/producer protocol, partitioning, and rebalancing
- Strong engineer in Java, Go, or a similar language
- Deep expertise in concurrency, distributed systems, and building reliable, maintainable production infrastructure
- Led high-impact, cross-team initiatives from ambiguous problems to shipped outcomes
- Ability to influence technical direction across an organization without relying on authority
- Strong fundamentals in Linux, networking, storage, and JVM-based systems
- Ability to reason about performance and failure modes from first principles
- Understanding of trade-offs of object-store-backed streaming including write-path latency versus cost, cross-AZ network cost avoidance, separation of compute and storage, and object metadata and caching design
- Ability to communicate with clarity and 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
Desired Qualifications
- 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
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