About the RoleThe team owns provisioning of clusters and the smart clients that sit in front of them, baking in sensible defaults so that other engineering teams get a turnkey caching solution instead of having to run their own. You'll help drive Boulder's evolution to scale further, improve cost efficiency, enhance performance, and support real-time updates; re-platform the Distributed Lock Service onto a strongly consistent backend; and build the self-serve tooling and recommendation engine that let customers describe a workload (QPS, TTL, payload size, latency profile) and get the right backend without talking to a human.
You'll go deep on cache invalidation, replication, sharding, compaction, and failover, while shipping the guardrails, automation, and observability that keep this scale operable by a small team.
You must be located in San Francisco, Seattle, or the New York Metro Area for this hybrid position. You will report to the Engineering Manager on the Distributed Caching team within the Storage organization.
You're excited about this opportunity because you will...- Own high-leverage caching and locking services with direct, measurable customer impact: cost, latency, and reliability at multi million QPS scale.
- Build and scale Boulder, our KVRocks backed key-value store, including compaction, sharding, and domain isolation.
- Re-platform the Distributed Lock Service onto a strongly consistent backend with sharding
- Contribute to the standardized smart caching client that bakes in failover, retry, and observability defaults so customers don't have to think about them.
- Diagnose and resolve production issues that span cache invalidation storms, replication lag, hot shards, and noisy-neighbor contention, then turn each one into a durable guardrail rather than a one-off fix.
- Collaborate closely with the teams that build on top of caching, including Taulu, ML Platform, and product engineering across DoorDash, Wolt, and Deliveroo.
We're excited about you because...- You have 6+ years of full-time experience designing, building, and operating distributed, stateful systems in production, at least 2 of which involved caching or key-value storage at meaningful scale.
- You are proficient in Go, or Java/Kotlin with deep expertise in concurrency, distributed systems, and production-grade backend services.
- You have hands-on experience with distributed caching technologies (Redis/Valkey, Memcached, or similar) and understand their failure modes: replication lag, failover, hot keys, and cache invalidation.
- You understand distributed systems fundamentals: consistency models, sharding and partitioning, replication, and consensus, and can reason about their trade-offs from first principles.
- You have built or operated systems that require careful capacity planning and cost discipline at scale, and you default to right-sizing over over-provisioning.
- You thrive in an execution-driven environment with a broad ownership area and a proven track record of shipping reliable infrastructure end to end.
- You have 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.
Preferred- Hands-on experience with ElastiCache, Memcached, or Valkey in production.
- Experience with KVRocks or RocksDB-family embedded storage engines (TiKV or similar), including compaction tuning and back-pressure handling.
- Experience building or operating a distributed lock service.
- Experience with Kubernetes and general cloud infrastructure operations.
- Contributions to open-source caching, storage, or distributed systems projects.
CompensationThe successful candidate's starting pay will fall within the pay range listed below and is determined based on job-related factors including, but not limited to, skills, experience, qualifications, work location, and market conditions. Base salary is localized according to an employee's work location. Ranges are market-dependent and may be modified in the future.
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 to all regular employees, which includes a 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 (e.g. Colorado Healthy Families and Workplaces Act). DoorDash also offers medical, dental, and vision benefits, 11 paid holidays, disability and basic life insurance, family-forming assistance, and a mental health program, among others.
To learn more about our benefits, visit our careers page here.
See below for paid time off details:
- For salaried roles: flexible paid time off/vacation, plus 80 hours of paid sick time per year.
- For hourly roles: vacation accrued at about 1 hour for every 25.97 hours worked (e.g. about 6.7 hours/month if working 40 hours/week; about 3.4 hours/month if working 20 hours/week), and paid sick time accrued at 1 hour for every 30 hours worked (e.g. about 5.8 hours/month if working 40 hours/week; about 2.9 hours/month if working 20 hours/week).
The national base pay range for this position within the United States, including Illinois and Colorado.
$159,800-$235,000 USD
