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!

Role Overview

We are 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.

Responsibilities

• 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

Requirements

• 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
• 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)

Qualifications

• Deep expertise in distributed databases, particularly Apache Cassandra, Redis, Kafka, and database agnostic abstractions
• Design, optimize, and scale distributed data access layers that power DoorDash’s most critical systems
• Partner with product engineering and infrastructure teams to deeply understand domain specific data needs and guide them in adopting paved path storage solutions
• 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
• Document decisions, share learnings, and take pride in contributing to reusable playbooks and durable frameworks for others to build upon

Skills

• Experience with distributed system concepts such as replication, partitioning, tunable consistency, and failure recovery
• Strong command of distributed system concepts such as replication, partitioning, tunable consistency, and failure recovery
• Experience with caching technologies like Redis or Memcached and know how to layer them effectively over storage systems to optimize for performance and cost
• Customer-first mindset, and thrive when working closely with product and platform teams to translate complex requirements into clean, scalable data models
• Skilled at communicating complex architecture decisions and building alignment across infrastructure and product engineering organizations
• Mentoring engineers, influencing data architecture at scale, and fostering best practices in reliability, observability, and data access patterns

Benefits

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.

Pay

I4 $130,600—$192,000 USD
I5 $159,800—$235,000 USD
I6 $193,800—$285,000 USD

Schedule

This role is hybrid with some in-office time expected.

Location

You must be located in San Francisco, Sunnyvale, Seattle or New York for this hybrid opportunity.