Staff Software Engineer, Event Streaming Systems

Description

The company is now part of DoorDash, so the role may involve working with teammates, systems and leaders across DoorDash and Wolt as one global team.

The Engineering teams build and scale systems for a global, three-sided marketplace of customers, riders and merchants, covering real-time logistics, resilient infrastructure and marketplace optimisation.

This is a hybrid role on the Event Streaming Systems team, part of the wider Storage organisation.

The team builds and runs event streaming infrastructure, including Kafka, the EventBus abstraction, messaging platform capabilities and future streaming technologies, for Tier-0 workflows that engineers rely on to build event-driven products.

The team works closely with Database Reliability, Storage, SRE, Data Platform and Core Infrastructure to keep critical data and messaging systems reliable, operable and cost-efficient at global scale.

Responsibilities

• Set the technical vision and roadmap for event streaming and messaging platforms, weighing reliability, scalability, cost, operability and developer experience.
• Lead team and cross-team initiatives for Kafka, EventBus and related streaming infrastructure, from defining unclear problems through design, delivery, rollout and adoption.
• Advise on Kafka, messaging, storage-adjacent and DBRE platform decisions across the company, DoorDash and Wolt.
• Design durable, extensible platform capabilities that other engineers and teams can reuse, cutting duplicated work and operational risk.
• Lead the resolution of complex distributed systems problems, such as reliability incidents, performance bottlenecks, capacity limits, data-safety risks and gaps in operability.
• Raise the operational bar for Tier-0 infrastructure through observability, automation, incident response, runbooks, operational readiness and ongoing improvement.
• Build alignment with partner teams, including EventBus, Storage, DBRE, SRE, Data Platform and Core Infrastructure, agreeing shared goals and managing cross-organisation delivery risk.
• Mentor engineers through guidance, design reviews, feedback, code review, incident review facilitation and knowledge sharing.
• Assess emerging streaming, storage and automation technologies, including AI-enabled operational tooling where useful, and push for pragmatic adoption where they clearly improve quality, velocity or efficiency.

Requirements

• You bring deep expertise in several of the areas below and the judgement to lead others through ambiguity.
• Significant experience building, operating and evolving production distributed systems, ideally for platform or infrastructure teams supporting critical workloads.
• Deep hands-on experience with Kafka or comparable event streaming systems as a platform, infrastructure service or business-critical production dependency.
• A track record of setting technical direction, shaping roadmaps and leading multi-engineer or cross-team initiatives.
• You make and own technical decisions in ambiguous situations, using data, operational signals, customer needs and long-term system health to weigh tradeoffs.
• Strong coding skills in Java, Go, Python or similar languages, focused on reliable, maintainable, observable and scalable production systems.
• Experience improving production reliability through automation, observability, capacity management, incident response, operational readiness and sustainable on-call practices.
• Strong grounding in distributed systems: Linux, networking, storage, JVM-based systems, fault tolerance, backpressure, capacity planning and performance tuning.
• You multiply the output of others by building reusable foundations, writing clear documentation, setting strong engineering practices, mentoring and removing single points of failure.
• Strong communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to influence platform, infrastructure, product and reliability teams without formal authority.
• Nice to have: experience contributing to Kafka or related open source distributed systems.
• Nice to have: experience with Redpanda, WarpStream, AutoMQ, Pulsar or similar streaming technologies.
• Nice to have: experience with JVM tuning, diskless streaming architectures or multi-region event streaming platforms.
• Nice to have: experience running Tier-0 infrastructure at large scale, including leading incidents and post-incident improvement programmes.
• Nice to have: experience with database reliability, storage systems, data platforms or DBRE practices alongside event streaming.
• Nice to have: experience using automation or AI-assisted operational tooling to improve reliability, developer experience or incident response quality.

Conditions

Hybrid working.

Equal opportunity employer.

Benefits

• Work on always-on infrastructure at real scale, with an impact on millions of people every day.
• Shape foundational platforms used by teams across the company, DoorDash and Wolt, and see your impact quickly.
• Take on ambiguous, high-impact technical problems with support from peers and leaders.
• A flexible, collaborative culture with high standards and continuous learning.
• Competitive salary and equity options.
• Tech blog available to read about how the company builds its systems.