Staff Software Engineer, Data Persistence

About the Role

Key Responsibilities

• Design and evolve our distributed database architecture, including storage engines, query layers, and consistency models.
• Evaluate and optimize write/read paths, indexing strategies, replication mechanisms, and failover recovery techniques.
• Lead the strategic roadmap for how we scale our multi-tenant, microservice-based architecture while ensuring strong guarantees (consistency, availability, durability).
• Partner with product, SRE, and platform teams to shape the future of our persistence, observability, and data access patterns.
• Optimize database infrastructure for cost-efficiency, balancing performance and scalability to improve platform margins at scale.
• Mentor senior engineers and serve as a thought leader across the organization.

Requirements

• Have authored or deeply contributed to high-performance distributed systems, databases, or storage engines.
• Possess deep fluency in CAP theorem tradeoffs, Raft/Paxos, LSM vs B-Tree internals, compaction strategies, and query execution plans.
• Have production experience scaling systems that handle TBs-PBs of data across multiple regions or data centers.
• Are comfortable navigating between practical tradeoffs and theoretical foundations in your technical decision-making.
• Can clearly articulate complex systems to diverse audiences and influence engineering direction across orgs.
• Strong hands-on experience with AWS cloud-native architectures, including services like Aurora Global Database, S3, Route53, and lambda.
• Strong experience with database observability tools like Datadog DBM or equivalent.
• Proficiency in at least one programming language (Kotlin, Java, Python, TypeScript).

Nice to Have

• Contributions to open-source database technologies (e.g., PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, RocksDB).
• Experience with hybrid transactional/analytical processing (HTAP) systems or stream processing architectures.
• Familiarity with emerging trends like vector databases, CRDTs, or columnar storage engines.
• Author, speaker, or deep contributor to technical books, blogs, or conference talks.

Qualifications

• Experience in high-performance distributed systems, databases, or storage engines.
• Deep understanding of CAP theorem, Raft/Paxos, and storage internals.
• Production experience with large-scale data systems across multiple regions or data centers.
• Proficiency in programming languages such as Kotlin, Java, Python, or TypeScript.

Benefits & Perks

• Typical starting salary range of $185,000-$220,000, with final amounts based on experience.
• Participation in the Company Stock Plan (subject to Stock Option Agreement).
• Unlimited vacation, educational and wellness reimbursements, and $0 cost employee insurance plans.
• Opportunities for career advancement and making a significant impact on the product.