Senior Software Engineer, Distributed Caching & Locks

DoorDash High Volume; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 160,000 - 235,000; Full time

Job summary

DoorDash is seeking an experienced distributed-systems engineer to own caching and locking services at scale. You’ll help scale Boulder and re-platform the Distributed Lock Service, while delivering self-serve tooling and a recommendation engine for workload-based backend selection.

This hybrid role requires deep Go or Java/Kotlin expertise, hands-on caching experience, and capacity planning at scale. You’ll work with Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure to maintain high reliability.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of full-time experience designing, building, and operating distributed, stateful systems in production, at least 2 of which involved caching or key-value storage at meaningful scale.
• Proficient in Go, or Java/Kotlin with deep expertise in concurrency, distributed systems, and production-grade backend services.
• Hands-on experience with distributed caching technologies (Redis/Valkey, Memcached, or similar) and understand their failure modes: replication lag, failover, hot keys, and cache invalidation.
• Understand distributed systems fundamentals: consistency models, sharding and partitioning, replication, and consensus, and can reason about their trade-offs from first principles.
• Experience with capacity planning and cost discipline at scale; right-sizing over over-provisioning.
• Execution-driven environment with broad ownership area and keeping reliability end-to-end.
• Proficiency in using AI coding tools (e.g., Claude Code, Codex, Cursor) in the full software development lifecycle, including designing, generating code, testing, monitoring, and releasing software.

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, our KVRocks backed key-value store, including compaction, sharding, and domain isolation.
• Re-platform the Distributed Lock Service onto a strongly consistent backend with sharding
• Contribute to the standardized smart caching client that bakes in failover, retry, and observability defaults so customers don’t have to think about them.
• Diagnose and resolve production issues that span cache invalidation storms, replication lag, hot shards, and noisy-neighbor contention, then turn each one into a durable guardrail rather than a one-off fix.
• Collaborate closely with the teams that build on top of caching, including Taulu, ML Platform, and product engineering across DoorDash, Wolt, and Deliveroo.

Skills

Distributed systems

Go

Java/Kotlin

Caching tech

Kubernetes

Cloud infra

AI coding tools

Tools

ElastiCache

Valkey

KVRocks

RocksDB

Memcached

Redis

Job description

DoorDash is seeking an experienced distributed-systems engineer to own caching and locking services at scale. You’ll help scale Boulder and re-platform the Distributed Lock Service, while delivering self-serve tooling and a recommendation engine for workload-based backend selection.

This hybrid role requires deep Go or Java/Kotlin expertise, hands-on caching experience, and capacity planning at scale. You’ll work with Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure to maintain high reliability.