Backend API Gateway Engineer

DoorDash; New York (NY); On-site; USD 131,000 - 192,000; Full time

Job summary

DoorDash is building a scalable API Gateway platform that sits at the front door of our traffic, translating REST/JSON to Protocol Buffers and routing to downstream services. You’ll design and maintain a high-throughput, resilient gateway used across DoorDash’s ecosystem, with a focus on authentication, routing, and OpenAPI contract management.

Join a team that values engineering excellence, platform abstractions, and AI-assisted development tools to empower hundreds of engineers while

Qualifications

• 2+ years in backend, infrastructure, or platform engineering.
• Experience with gRPC, REST APIs, Protocol Buffers, and service-to-service communication.
• Deep knowledge of Kotlin (or another JVM language) for building high-scale systems; familiarity with Vert.x is a plus.
• Experience with high-throughput, mission-critical production systems.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems concepts, including consistency, fault tolerance, load balancing, and resilience patterns.
• Comfortable with API gateway concerns — authentication and authorization, request routing, and schema/contract management (e.g., OpenAPI).
• Proficiency with AI coding tools in the full software development lifecycle.

Responsibilities

• Design and build robust, scalable systems with engineering excellence and long-term maintainability in mind.
• Improve performance, reliability, scalability, and security across the gateway and its request-processing pipeline.
• Drive best practices in API management, service discovery, load balancing, and fault tolerance.
• Champion adoption of the Unified Gateway platform across product teams.
• Troubleshoot and resolve complex issues in our high-throughput production environment.
• Evaluate and integrate new technologies to enhance the platform's capabilities.
• Leverage the latest AI-assisted development tools and best practices.

Skills

Backend engineering

gRPC

REST APIs

Protobuf

Kotlin JVM

Vert.x

Distributed systems

API gateway

AI coding tools

Job description

DoorDash is building a scalable API Gateway platform that sits at the front door of our traffic, translating REST/JSON to Protocol Buffers and routing to downstream services. You’ll design and maintain a high-throughput, resilient gateway used across DoorDash’s ecosystem, with a focus on authentication, routing, and OpenAPI contract management.

Join a team that values engineering excellence, platform abstractions, and AI-assisted development tools to empower hundreds of engineers while