About the Role

We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer to set the technical direction for our event streaming platform and lead its evolution over the next several years. This is a senior individual-contributor role: you'll operate as a force multiplier across teams, owning the hardest architectural problems, driving org-wide technical strategy, and raising the engineering bar for everyone who builds on and operates streaming infrastructure.

You'll go deep on the internals of modern streaming systems, from the Kafka protocol and storage engine to object-store-backed, diskless architectures like WarpStream and AutoMQ. You'll make the high-leverage bets that determine how DoorDash streams data for years to come, on a platform that serves hundreds of engineering teams and trillions of events per day.

You must be located in the New York Metro Area for this hybrid position. You will report to the Engineering Manager on our Event Streaming Systems team within the Storage organization.
You're excited about this opportunity because you will...

• Set the multi-year technical vision and architecture for DoorDash's event streaming platform, and drive alignment in that direction across Storage, SRE, Data Platform, and Product Engineering.
• Lead the largest and most ambiguous streaming initiatives end to end, such as re-architecting toward diskless, object-store-backed streaming to cut cost and operational overhead across the fleet.
• Go deep on the internals of Kafka and modern streaming systems (WarpStream, AutoMQ, and similar), and use that depth to solve problems that block the rest of the organization.
• Own architectural decisions with company-wide blast radius, from replication, consensus, and storage design to multi-region topology, capacity, and cost efficiency.
• Debug and resolve the hardest distributed systems problems in production, including subtle correctness, performance, and reliability issues under Tier-0 constraints.
• Raise the technical bar through design reviews, mentorship of senior engineers, and by establishing the standards and patterns others build on.
• Partner with engineering leadership to shape roadmaps, make build-versus-buy and open-source-versus-managed decisions, and translate business needs into platform strategy.

We're excited about you because...

• You have deep 8+ years of hands-on experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems in production, with a track record of technical leadership across multiple teams or an organization.
• You have operated event streaming systems such as Kafka at scale, and you understand their internals, including the log storage engine, the ISR replication model, metadata consensus (KRaft/ZooKeeper), the consumer/producer protocol, partitioning, and rebalancing.
• You are a strong engineer in Java, Go, or a similar language, with deep expertise in concurrency, distributed systems, and building reliable, maintainable production infrastructure.
• You have led high-impact, cross-team initiatives from ambiguous problems to shipped outcomes, and you can influence technical direction across an organization without relying on authority.
• You have strong fundamentals in Linux, networking, storage, and JVM-based systems, and you use them to reason about performance and failure modes from first principles.
• You understand the trade-offs of object-store-backed streaming, including write-path latency versus cost, cross-AZ network cost avoidance, the separation of compute and storage, and object metadata and caching design.
• You communicate with clarity and can bring engineers, managers, and leaders along on complex technical decisions and trade-offs.
• 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

• 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.

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.

$193,800-$285,000 USD