About the Role

We are looking for a Staff Backend Engineer to join our team. As a Staff Engineer, you are a technical leader and trusted advisor - you set the engineering excellence bar, own ambiguous cross-functional problems, and shape the roadmap for your domain. You will be the technical visionary leading our transition into high-level autonomy. You will drive the architecture and strategy for our notification experience at massive scale, while making every notification smarter, more timely, and more relevant for millions of customers.

This role requires a deep understanding of distributed systems, AI fluency, and a product-minded approach to technical leadership. You will be responsible for building a system that balances immediate conversion value against long-term reachability costs.
You're excited about this opportunity because you will...

Technical Leadership & Architecture

• Define and own the multi-quarter technical strategy for notification hub and experience team.
• Architect the notification system and experience, moving from campaign centric notification to an integrated personalized system that reasons over the entire user notification lifecycle.
• Make high-quality architectural decisions across relevance, latency, and system complexity
• Raise the engineering excellence bar for the Notification Hub & Experience team and consistently identify and drive areas for improvement.
• Partner with cross functional teams to integrate intelligence and evolve the system over time

Product Development

• Build and ship notification system at massive scale with smart and personalized experience
• Identify opportunities in notification system and lifecycle to drive larger business impact
• Prototype quickly to explore new ideas, while knowing when to invest in more durable systems
• Stay current with emerging AI tools, models, and harness, and bring them into the team where they create leverage
• Help define whole system architecture and experimentation approaches for personalized notification system

Business Outcome Ownership

• Translate product goals into clear technical approaches and measurable outcomes
• Own the impact of your work, including engagement and user experience metrics
• Demonstrate product thinking alongside technical depth. PMs and EMs should view you as a co-owner of the Notifications domain, not just the technical executor.

Cross-Functional & Cross-Org Influence

• Partner with product, design, data science, and infrastructure teams to shape strategy and resolve ambiguous, high-stakes technical decisions.
• Lead project coordination across engineers and multiple workstreams simultaneously; own timelines, dependencies, and stakeholder communication.
• Collaborate with Product, Design, and Marketing to help align notification strategies across different surfaces and use cases

People & Force Multiplication

• Eliminate single points of failure, including yourself through proactive documentation, knowledge transfer, and building durable systems and processes.
• Mentor and grow E4/E5 engineers through design reviews, code reviews, and direct coaching; take accountability for their technical development.
• Act as a force multiplier by uplifting the team's technical skill set in AI fluency and high-scale backend engineering.
• Raise the technical bar for the team.

Engineering Excellence & Reliability

• Own end-to-end reliability of notification delivery; drive SLA improvements, reduce latency, and eliminate systemic failure modes across a high-throughput distributed infrastructure.
• Champion observability, operational hygiene, and developer productivity improvements across the team.

We're excited about you because...

Required:

• 7+ years of backend engineering experience with clear, demonstrated Staff-level impact - you have driven large, ambiguous, cross-functional projects with org-wide or company-wide outcomes.
• Strong proficiency in one or more backend languages (Go, Java, Python, C++, Kotlin or similar).
• Deep experience designing and scaling distributed systems that handle a massive volume of events per day.
• Ability to operate at multiple altitudes: from long-horizon technical strategy down to precise system design, without losing sight of the business outcome.
• Strong written and verbal communication; able to drive alignment across engineering, product, and leadership without formal authority.
• You are AI-Fluent and have deep experience applying AI in the software development
• You are Product-Minded and think in terms of business impact.

Preferred:

• Experience building notification, messaging, or communications platforms at scale.
• Proven background integrating ML/AI systems in production - model serving, feature pipelines, real-time inference, or experimentation infrastructure.
• Familiarity with recommendation, or personalization systems.
• Experience with LLM integration in production services.

Compensation

Actual compensation within the pay range listed below will be decided based on factors including, but not limited to, skills, prior relevant experience, and specific work location. Base salary is localized according to employee work location.

In addition to base salary, the compensation for this role includes opportunities for equity grants. Talk to your recruiter for more information.

DoorDash cares about you and your overall well-being. That's why we offer a comprehensive benefits package for all regular employees, that includes paid time off, paid parental leave, wellness benefit and several paid holidays.

Additionally, for full-time employees, DoorDash offers medical, dental, and vision benefits, disability and basic life insurance, an RRSP including an employer match, and a mental health program, among others.

To learn more about our benefits, visit our careers page here.

The base pay for this position ranges from our lowest geographical market up to our highest geographical market within British Columbia.

I4

$120,000-$150,000 CAD

I5

$149,500-$187,000 CAD

I6

$185,000-$231,500 CAD