About the Role

As a member of the Unified Gateway team, you'll build and maintain the API Gateway platform that sits at the front door of DoorDash's traffic - an HTTP-to-gRPC reverse proxy that accepts REST/JSON requests, translates them into Protocol Buffer messages, calls downstream gRPC services, and translates the responses back to clients. The platform empowers product engineers to declaratively define, test, deploy, and operate their API endpoints without standing up and managing their own edge services. It centrally handles authentication, authorization, request and response mapping, header propagation, encryption, and resilience, and powers experiences across DoorDash, Wolt, and Deliveroo spanning iOS, Android, and Web. By providing this robust platform, we deliver significant improvements in:

• Velocity: Product engineers can iterate faster and deliver features more quickly.
• Scalability: The platform is designed to handle increasing demand and traffic seamlessly.
• Reliability: A safe programming model, centralized management, and standardized practices enhance system stability and reduce errors.
• Cost Efficiency: Consolidating resources and streamlining processes optimizes operational costs across DoorDash.

You're excited about this opportunity because you will...

• Design and build robust, scalable systems with engineering excellence and long-term maintainability in mind.
• Improve performance, reliability, scalability, and security across the gateway and its request-processing pipeline.
• Drive best practices in API management, service discovery, load balancing, and fault tolerance.
• Champion adoption of the Unified Gateway platform across product teams.
• Troubleshoot and resolve complex issues in our high-throughput production environment.
• Evaluate and integrate new technologies to enhance the platform's capabilities.
• Leverage the latest AI-assisted development tools and best practices.

We're excited about you because...

• You have 2+ years of experience in backend, infrastructure, or platform engineering.
• You have experience with gRPC, REST APIs, Protocol Buffers, and service-to-service communication patterns.
• You have deep knowledge of best practices in Kotlin (or another JVM language) for building high-scale, resilient systems; familiarity with asynchronous/reactive frameworks such as Vert.x is a plus.
• You have experience working on high-throughput, mission-critical production systems.
• You have a strong understanding of distributed systems concepts, including consistency, fault tolerance, load balancing, and resilience patterns.
• You are comfortable with API gateway and proxy concerns - authentication and authorization, request routing, and schema/contract management (e.g., OpenAPI).
• You value solving problems at the platform level, building abstractions that make life easier for hundreds of engineers.
• 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

Compensation

The 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.

$130,600-$192,000 USD