Senior Distributed Caching Engineer (Go/Java)

Visa Hunt; San Francisco, Seattle (CA, WA); Hybrid; USD 160,000 - 235,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

401(k) plan with employer matching

16 weeks of paid parental leave

wellness benefits

commuter benefits match

paid time off and paid sick leave

medical benefits

dental benefits

vision benefits

11 paid holidays

disability and basic life insurance

family‑forming assistance

mental health program

Job summary

DoorDash is seeking a senior engineer to own and evolve distributed caching and locking services used across our delivery platform. You will scale Boulder (KVRocks-based) storage, optimize compaction and sharding, and re-platform the Distributed Lock Service on a strongly consistent backend.

Expect collaboration with Taulu, ML Platform and product teams to deliver reliable infrastructure at scale. You will tackle cache invalidation, replication, and guardrail automation, while contributing to

Qualifications

• 6+ years of full-time experience designing, building, and operating distributed, stateful systems in production, with at least 2 years in caching or key-value storage at scale.
• Proficiency in Go, or Java/Kotlin with expertise in concurrency, distributed systems, and production-grade backend services.
• Hands-on experience with distributed caching technologies (Redis/Valkey, Memcached, or similar) and understanding of failure modes: replication lag, failover, hot keys, cache invalidation.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems fundamentals: consistency, sharding, replication, and consensus, with ability to reason about trade-offs.
• Experience with capacity planning and cost discipline at scale, with a bias toward right-sizing.
• Proven track record of shipping reliable infrastructure end to end.
• Familiarity with AI coding tools (e.g., Claude Code, Codex, Cursor) in the full software lifecycle.

Responsibilities

• Own high-leverage caching and locking services with direct, measurable customer impact: cost, latency, and reliability at multi-million QPS scale.
• Build and scale Boulder, the KVRocks-backed key-value store, including its compaction, sharding, and domain isolation.
• Re-platform the Distributed Lock Service onto a strongly consistent backend with sharding.
• Contribute to a standardized smart caching client with failover, retry, and observability defaults.
• Diagnose and resolve production issues spanning cache invalidation storms, replication lag, hot shards, and noisy-neighbor contention; convert fixes into durable guardrails.
• Collaborate with teams building on top of caching (Taulu, ML Platform, DoorDash/Wolt/Deliveroo product engineering).

Skills

Go

Java

Kotlin

concurrency

distributed systems

backend services

AI coding tools

Tools

ElastiCache

Memcached

Valkey

KVRocks

RocksDB

Kubernetes

Job description

DoorDash is seeking a senior engineer to own and evolve distributed caching and locking services used across our delivery platform. You will scale Boulder (KVRocks-based) storage, optimize compaction and sharding, and re-platform the Distributed Lock Service on a strongly consistent backend.

Expect collaboration with Taulu, ML Platform and product teams to deliver reliable infrastructure at scale. You will tackle cache invalidation, replication, and guardrail automation, while contributing to