Senior Software Engineer, Distributed Databases

Bloomberg; Greater London; On-site; GBP 55,000 - 95,000; Full time

Job summary

Bloomberg is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to design, build, and operate a distributed OLTP storage platform across 10,000+ MySQL shards. You will work in Go and C++ on Vitess, MySQL, MyRocks, and RocksDB, with Python for automation and analysis, delivering safe, scalable infrastructure across regions.

The role emphasizes on-call reliability, incident investigations, and contributing upstream to critical database components.

Qualifications

• Significant experience with distributed databases or production infra at scale.
• Expertise in Vitess, sharded SQL, MySQL internals or RocksDB.
• Strong Go and/or C++ engineering skills for large, mature systems.
• Ability to debug using profiling, tracing, and OS-level analysis.
• Experience deploying safe infra changes with testing and rollouts.
• Clear technical judgment and communication of design trade-offs.
• Degree in CS/Engineering or equivalent practical experience.
• Open source contributions to database/storage projects preferred.
• Experience operating fleets with thousands of shards preferred.

Responsibilities

• Design and evolve a 10,000+ shard Vitess/MySQL/MyRocks fleet across regions.
• Develop in Go and C++, with Python for automation and testing.
• Improve query serving, replication, failover, online schema changes, resharding, backups, upgrades.
• Diagnose production issues across queries, transactions, storage engines, and hardware.
• Build operational intelligence and AI-assisted tooling for diagnostics and remediation.
• Participate in on-call rotation and drive platform improvements from incidents.
• Lead designs, investigations, mentoring, and contribute to open-source projects.

Skills

Distributed systems

Vitess

Go / C++

Profiling & debugging

Observability

Technical communication

Open source contributions

Large-scale sharding

Education

CS/Engineering degree

Tools

MySQL

Vitess

RocksDB

Go

C++

Python

SQL

Job description

Salary: £55,000 - 95,000 per year

Requirements:

• Significant experience designing, building, or operating distributed databases or production infrastructure at scale.
• Deep expertise in at least one of these areas, with an interest in working across the broader stack: Vitess or a comparable sharded SQL system; MySQL server internals; or MyRocks, RocksDB, or another LSM-based storage engine.
• Strong production software engineering skills in Go and/or C++, including the ability to understand and modify large, mature systems codebases.
• Experience debugging complex behavior through profiling, tracing, thread and process analysis, source-code inspection, operating-system telemetry, and controlled reproduction.
• Experience making high-risk infrastructure changes safely through testing, staged rollout, observability, fault containment, and rollback.
• Clear technical judgment and the ability to communicate designs, trade-offs, incidents, and operational risks.
• A degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related discipline, or equivalent practical experience.
• Preferred: Accepted upstream contributions to Vitess, MySQL, MyRocks, RocksDB, or another database or storage project.
• Preferred: Experience operating database fleets at thousands-of-shards scale.

Responsibilities:

• Design and implement capabilities to safely operate and evolve our 10,000+ shard Vitess/MySQL/MyRocks fleet across regions.
• Work in Go and C++ across Vitess, MySQL, MyRocks, and RocksDB, using Python where appropriate for automation, testing, and analysis.
• Improve query serving, replication, automated failover, online schema changes, VReplication and resharding, backup and restore, major-version upgrades, compaction, capacity management, and workload isolation.
• Diagnose production issues across query execution, transactions, locking, replication, storage engines, filesystems, operating systems, runtimes, and hardware.
• Build operational intelligence, including carefully tested AI-assisted tooling, to correlate metrics, logs, traces, topology, code paths, and recent changes, accelerating diagnosis and supporting safe, auditable remediation.
• Participate in a sustainable on-call rotation and turn recurring incidents and operational work into durable platform improvements.
• Lead technical designs and incident investigations, mentor engineers, and contribute to the open-source projects on which our platform depends.

Technologies:

• AI
• CTO
• Hardware
• MySQL
• Python
• SQL
• Vitess
• Support

More:

We are Bloomberg, and our business runs on financial data that must be correct, durable, globally available, and served with low latency. In Engineering and CTO, our team builds and operates Bloombergs distributed OLTP storage platform, supporting petabytes of critical financial data across more than 10,000 MySQL shards. We build custom read and write APIs that provide engineers with safe, predictable access to financial data while managing the complexity and operational risks of sharding and database infrastructure. This hands-on Senior Software Engineer role works at the intersection of distributed systems and database internals, with opportunities to improve our platform and contribute fixes and features upstream. The role is based in London. We welcome applications from candidates who can demonstrate the necessary skills; years of experience, where stated, are a guide.

last updated 40 week of 2026