What are the responsibilities and job description for the Distributed Systems Engineer, Cassandra, Storage position at DoorDash?
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 Cassandra team under Storage is looking for passionate distributed systems engineers to architect and scale the next evolution of our Cassandra ecosystem. This team plays a critical role in scaling and hardening DoorDash's foundational key-value storage systems, powering mission-critical Tier 0 workloads across the company. This is a rare opportunity to shape the future of Cassandra at DoorDash, designing and scaling systems to meet 100x growth demands. You will help evolve our Cassandra ecosystem with a focus on end to end automation including building a self-service control plane, deep observability, and advanced online to offline infrastructure. You will also contribute to the upstream Apache Cassandra ecosystem where applicable, working alongside the open-source community.
About The Role
The Storage team is building and operating a high performance, scalable, reliable data abstraction layer that optimizes reliability and efficiency. You will help us bootstrap and scale our internal distributed database infrastructure centered around Cassandra, with a focus on reliability, operability, security and efficiency. This infrastructure will be the backbone of a platform that strives to manage itself and disappear into the background, enabling engineers to focus on building product experiences our customers love. You will report into the Engineering Manager on our Storage team within the Core Infrastructure Organization. You will have the opportunity to contribute to open-source projects and improve the ecosystem for its community.
You’re Excited About This Opportunity Because You Will…
We use Covey as part of our hiring and/or promotional process for jobs in NYC and certain features may qualify it as an AEDT in NYC. As part of the hiring and/or promotion process, we provide Covey with job requirements and candidate submitted applications. We began using Covey Scout for Inbound from August 21, 2023, through December 21, 2023, and resumed using Covey Scout for Inbound again on June 29, 2024.
The Covey tool has been reviewed by an independent auditor. Results of the audit may be viewed here: Covey
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
I4
$130,600—$192,000 USD
I5
$159,800—$235,000 USD
I6
$193,800—$285,000 USD
About DoorDash
At DoorDash, our mission to empower local economies shapes how our team members move quickly, learn, and reiterate in order to make impactful decisions that display empathy for our range of users—from Dashers to merchant partners to consumers. We are a technology and logistics company that started with door-to-door delivery, and we are looking for team members who can help us go from a company that is known for delivering food to a company that people turn to for any and all goods.
DoorDash is growing rapidly and changing constantly, which gives our team members the opportunity to share their unique perspectives, solve new challenges, and own their careers. We're committed to supporting employees’ happiness, healthiness, and overall well-being by providing comprehensive benefits and perks including premium healthcare, wellness expense reimbursement, paid parental leave and more.
Our Commitment to Diversity and Inclusion
We’re committed to growing and empowering a more inclusive community within our company, industry, and cities. That’s why we hire and cultivate diverse teams of people from all backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives. We believe that true innovation happens when everyone has room at the table and the tools, resources, and opportunity to excel.
Statement of Non-Discrimination: In keeping with our beliefs and goals, no employee or applicant will face discrimination or harassment based on: race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion, age, gender, marital/domestic partner status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, disability status, or veteran status. Above and beyond discrimination and harassment based on “protected categories,” we also strive to prevent other subtler forms of inappropriate behavior (i.e., stereotyping) from ever gaining a foothold in our office. Whether blatant or hidden, barriers to success have no place at DoorDash. We value a diverse workforce – people who identify as women, non-binary or gender non-conforming, LGBTQIA , American Indian or Native Alaskan, Black or African American, Hispanic or Latinx, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, differently-abled, caretakers and parents, and veterans are strongly encouraged to apply. Thank you to the Level Playing Field Institute for this statement of non-discrimination.
Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, Los Angeles Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance, and any other state or local hiring regulations, we will consider for employment any qualified applicant, including those with arrest and conviction records, in a manner consistent with the applicable regulation.
If you need any accommodations, please inform your recruiting contact upon initial connection.
The Storage teams build and operate online stateful systems and abstractions that are reliable, efficient, secure and easy to use for DoorDash Engineering. The Cassandra team under Storage is looking for passionate distributed systems engineers to architect and scale the next evolution of our Cassandra ecosystem. This team plays a critical role in scaling and hardening DoorDash's foundational key-value storage systems, powering mission-critical Tier 0 workloads across the company. This is a rare opportunity to shape the future of Cassandra at DoorDash, designing and scaling systems to meet 100x growth demands. You will help evolve our Cassandra ecosystem with a focus on end to end automation including building a self-service control plane, deep observability, and advanced online to offline infrastructure. You will also contribute to the upstream Apache Cassandra ecosystem where applicable, working alongside the open-source community.
About The Role
The Storage team is building and operating a high performance, scalable, reliable data abstraction layer that optimizes reliability and efficiency. You will help us bootstrap and scale our internal distributed database infrastructure centered around Cassandra, with a focus on reliability, operability, security and efficiency. This infrastructure will be the backbone of a platform that strives to manage itself and disappear into the background, enabling engineers to focus on building product experiences our customers love. You will report into the Engineering Manager on our Storage team within the Core Infrastructure Organization. You will have the opportunity to contribute to open-source projects and improve the ecosystem for its community.
You’re Excited About This Opportunity Because You Will…
- Play a foundational role in shaping the direction of Cassandra ecosystem at DoorDash, helping define long-term strategy and platform capabilities.
- Build the future of Cassandra at DoorDash, including self-serve provisioning, elastic scaling, multi-tenant controls, and deeply integrated observability.
- Operate one of DoorDash’s most critical stateful systems, supporting high-throughput, low-latency production workloads at scale.
- Partner with the Storage Orchestration team to define automation and fleet management capabilities.
- Lead architectural improvements that enhance availability, fault tolerance, consistency, and multi-region durability.
- Define operational standards for schema governance, disaster recovery, backup and restore, and capacity planning.
- Have the chance to troubleshoot, debug and learn from interesting production problems at multiple layers of the infrastructure stack.
- You have 5 years of experience building distributed systems with deep understanding of Cassandra internals, including replication, compaction, GC tuning, and JVM performance.
- You have experience managing large fleets of database clusters, including building tools, monitoring, capacity planning, backups and disaster recovery strategies.
- You are proficient in system-level fundamentals including operating systems, hardware, and networking.
- You understand the tradeoffs of distributed system consistency, failure modes, and partition tolerance.
- You have contributed to or are interested in contributing to open-source distributed database projects.
- You thrive in a fast-paced, execution-driven environment and have a proven track record of delivering impactful storage solutions.
We use Covey as part of our hiring and/or promotional process for jobs in NYC and certain features may qualify it as an AEDT in NYC. As part of the hiring and/or promotion process, we provide Covey with job requirements and candidate submitted applications. We began using Covey Scout for Inbound from August 21, 2023, through December 21, 2023, and resumed using Covey Scout for Inbound again on June 29, 2024.
The Covey tool has been reviewed by an independent auditor. Results of the audit may be viewed here: Covey
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).
I4
$130,600—$192,000 USD
I5
$159,800—$235,000 USD
I6
$193,800—$285,000 USD
About DoorDash
At DoorDash, our mission to empower local economies shapes how our team members move quickly, learn, and reiterate in order to make impactful decisions that display empathy for our range of users—from Dashers to merchant partners to consumers. We are a technology and logistics company that started with door-to-door delivery, and we are looking for team members who can help us go from a company that is known for delivering food to a company that people turn to for any and all goods.
DoorDash is growing rapidly and changing constantly, which gives our team members the opportunity to share their unique perspectives, solve new challenges, and own their careers. We're committed to supporting employees’ happiness, healthiness, and overall well-being by providing comprehensive benefits and perks including premium healthcare, wellness expense reimbursement, paid parental leave and more.
Our Commitment to Diversity and Inclusion
We’re committed to growing and empowering a more inclusive community within our company, industry, and cities. That’s why we hire and cultivate diverse teams of people from all backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives. We believe that true innovation happens when everyone has room at the table and the tools, resources, and opportunity to excel.
Statement of Non-Discrimination: In keeping with our beliefs and goals, no employee or applicant will face discrimination or harassment based on: race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion, age, gender, marital/domestic partner status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, disability status, or veteran status. Above and beyond discrimination and harassment based on “protected categories,” we also strive to prevent other subtler forms of inappropriate behavior (i.e., stereotyping) from ever gaining a foothold in our office. Whether blatant or hidden, barriers to success have no place at DoorDash. We value a diverse workforce – people who identify as women, non-binary or gender non-conforming, LGBTQIA , American Indian or Native Alaskan, Black or African American, Hispanic or Latinx, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, differently-abled, caretakers and parents, and veterans are strongly encouraged to apply. Thank you to the Level Playing Field Institute for this statement of non-discrimination.
Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, Los Angeles Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance, and any other state or local hiring regulations, we will consider for employment any qualified applicant, including those with arrest and conviction records, in a manner consistent with the applicable regulation.
If you need any accommodations, please inform your recruiting contact upon initial connection.
Salary : $130,600 - $285,000