Senior Datastore Platform Engineer (Kafka & DBs)

Gusto; Denver (CO); Hybrid; USD 183,000 - 245,000; Full time

Job summary

Gusto is seeking an experienced infrastructure engineer to evolve data storage at scale. You will build a platform for provisioning datastores, evaluate scalable storage systems, and strengthen databases our product depends on.

You’ll own Kafka operations and help stand up DynamoDB-like datastores, coordinating migrations with minimal disruption. You’ll work with a datastores infrastructure team responsible for Kafka, MySQL, Postgres, Redis, and more, driving automation and reliability.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of software engineering experience building and operating large-scale infrastructure systems with streaming and/or non-relational datastores
• Strong understanding of distributed systems concepts and production migrations/topology changes
• Experience running production cloud infrastructure including Redis, Kafka and datastores
• Clear communication and ability to collaborate on technical direction across teams
• Curiosity and ability to operate in an AI-native environment with AI tooling
• Bonus: experience with self-hosted distributed databases on Kubernetes (TiDB, CockroachDB, Vitess, Citus)
• Bonus: experience with Ruby on Rails or similar MVC frameworks at scale

Responsibilities

• Build tooling and platform to provision new datastores and pilot scalable storage systems
• Own Kafka capacity planning, tuning, and reliability at scale; stand up non-relational datastores like DynamoDB
• Coordinate migrations/topology changes across datastore platform with minimal production disruption
• Drive efficiency and reliability through query optimization, caching, workload management, and automation
• Participate in on-call duties and reduce operational burden over time
• Partner with product engineering teams to enable rapid, reliable product development and share knowledge

Skills

Kafka

DynamoDB

Redis

MySQL

PostgreSQL

Kubernetes

Cloud infrastructure

Distributed systems

Communication

AI tooling

Tools

TiDB

CockroachDB

Vitess

Citus

Job description

Gusto is seeking an experienced infrastructure engineer to evolve data storage at scale. You will build a platform for provisioning datastores, evaluate scalable storage systems, and strengthen databases our product depends on.

You’ll own Kafka operations and help stand up DynamoDB-like datastores, coordinating migrations with minimal disruption. You’ll work with a datastores infrastructure team responsible for Kafka, MySQL, Postgres, Redis, and more, driving automation and reliability.