Staff Software Engineer, Backend

About the Team DoorDash is building the world's most reliable on-demand, logistics engine for delivery. We are continuing to grow rapidly and expanding our Engineering offices globally! We are looking for Staff Backend Engineers to build and maintain a large scale 24x7 global infrastructure system that powers DoorDash's 3-sided marketplace of Consumers, Merchants and Dashers. About the Role We’re looking for Staff Backend Engineers to work on both Product and Product Platform based teams. Product focused Engineers work at the intersection of product and infrastructure to solve key business problems with elegant technical solutions. You'll operate our backend services and architecture that support all product functionality and will be challenged to consider the big picture -- collaborating cross-functionally, as well as evaluating and executing on trade-offs to maximize business impact for the company.  We expect Staff Engineers to be able to run cross-functional projects end to end, mentor their junior to mid level peers and influence our technical roadmaps This role is hybrid with some in-office time expected and will report to an Engineering Manager.  You're excited about this opportunity because you will… Develop, release and run large-scale web applications Develop and define the backend architecture and tech stack for a product area Improve performance, reliability, scalability and security for our backend systems Be involved in transitioning our monolithic codebase to a microservice-based architecture Completely disrupt logistics by tackling bleeding-edge, technical problems We're excited about you because you have… B.S., M.S., or PhD. in Computer Science or equivalent 8+ years of industry experience 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 Prior experience working with backend tech stacks Ability to analyze and improve efficiency, scalability, and stability of various system resources Experience with service oriented architecture, writing REST API’s, unit testing, and architectural design Understanding of modern web stacks and architecture (HTTP, REST) Experience with SQL and NoSQL databases and other technologies (e.g. Postgres, Redis, Elasticsearch, RabbitMQ) About the Team The Storage teams build and operate online stateful systems and abstractions that are reliable, efficient, secure and easy to use for DoorDash Engineering. The teams are responsible for understanding Product Engineering’s evolving needs and developing platform and infrastructure capabilities to serve them. The team currently supports CockroachDB, Cassandra, Kafka and Redis as well as data abstraction services to reduce the complexity of interacting with storage systems for Product Engineers. About the Role We’re hiring a Data Solutions Engineer with deep expertise in distributed databases, particularly Apache Cassandra, Redis, Kafka, and database agnostic abstractions. In this role, you will design, optimize, and scale distributed data access layers that power DoorDash’s most critical systems, ensuring high availability, low latency, and fault tolerance. You’ll serve as a hands-on architect and technical partner to product engineering and infrastructure teams, helping translate complex business requirements into resilient and scalable data models. Your work will directly influence the evolution of Taulu , DoorDash’s unified storage abstraction layer, by shaping best practices and identifying platform gaps through real world engagements. This is a high-impact, cross functional role that combines deep technical expertise with a customer centric approach. You’ll lead solutioning engagements from design through production, drive the adoption of Taulu modeling best practices, and ensure that our systems meet goals around reliability, cost efficiency, and velocity. You must be located in San Francisco, Sunnyvale, Seattle or New York for this hybrid opportunity.  You’re excited about this opportunity because you will… Design and implement highly scalable, fault tolerant distributed database solutions using Taulu, Apache Cassandra, Redis, Kafka, and other paved path storage solutions.  Architect and optimize multi-region, globally distributed systems to meet our high standards for availability, latency, and throughput. Lead data modeling, performance tuning, and capacity planning for large-scale, mission-critical storage workloads. Partner with product engineering and infrastructure teams to deeply understand domain specific data needs and guide them in adopting paved path storage solutions. Serve as the DRI for solutioning engagements , owning modeling in Taulu from experimentation through launch and scale. Shape the evolution of Taulu by identifying abstraction gaps and converting customer feedback into platform improvements. Apply workload-aware design patterns, including caching strategies, partitioning, and consistency tuning to improve performance and efficiency. Drive adoption of operational best practices across observability, schema design, capacity planning, and cost optimization across storage systems. Promote clarity and continuity by contributing to solutioning playbooks, decision logs, and architectural documentation. We’re excited about you because… You have 10+ years of experience designing and scaling distributed data systems, with deep expertise in NoSQL technologies like Apache Cassandra, DynamoDB, or ScyllaDB. You have a strong command of distributed system concepts such as replication, partitioning, tunable consistency, and failure recovery. You’ve led data modeling efforts for high-throughput, low-latency workloads and understand the real-world trade-offs involved in NoSQL schema design. You are experienced with caching technologies like Redis or Memcached and