Senior Software Engineer, Foundational Storage

Sentry; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 190,000 - 400,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Commuter Stipend

Professional Development Stipend

Charitable Matching Program

Flexible PTO

Job summary

Sentry is seeking a Senior Software Engineer for Foundational Storage in San Francisco. You will design and operate stateful storage systems, including object storage, databases, and caches, and build APIs that make storage easy for product teams.

You’ll work on data consistency, availability, performance, and cost-efficiency, writing in Rust and Python. You'll own latency/availability SLOs, participate in on-call rotations, and collaborate with Platform teams to create a fault-tolerant storage

Qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering experience building and operating distributed, stateful systems in production.
• Hands-on experience with object storage, relational databases, and caching systems at production scale; familiarity with key-value or wide-column stores is a plus.
• Understanding of distributed systems fundamentals including consistency, concurrency, and retry behavior under failures.
• Proficiency in a systems language such as Go, C++, Java, or Rust, and comfort with Python.
• Experience running services on Kubernetes in a cloud environment with observability, SLOs, and incident response; Terraform familiarity is a plus.
• Strong written and spoken English; ability to explain technical choices and write documentation.
• Nice to have: experience building shared libraries or internal APIs, data migration, or performance optimization.

Responsibilities

• Design and operate storage systems used across Sentry, including configuration and performance tuning.
• Create APIs and abstractions that simplify storage usage for product teams with security and scale built in.
• Tackle storage challenges at scale, including consistency under concurrent access, sharding, and routing reads/writes across backends.
• Collaborate with product engineers to plan migrations and promote tool adoption.
• Coordinate with Platform and Infrastructure teams to deliver a fault-tolerant data platform and align roadmaps.
• Improve storage performance and cost efficiency by optimizing backend usage while keeping the platform simple.
• Write Rust and Python code with user-facing documentation and develop production-grade tests.

Skills

Distributed systems

Go

Rust

Python

C++

Java

Kubernetes

Observability

Tools

Kubernetes

Terraform

Job description

Senior Software Engineer, Foundational Storage

About Sentry

Software runs the world and the pace is faster than ever. Sentry helps developers fix errors and performance issues before users notice, so teams can spend less time firefighting and more time building.

Trusted by 200,000+ organizations, Sentry is today’s application monitoring standard and our team is building its AI-native future.

About the role

Sentry’s Foundational Storage team builds and supports the stateful storage systems that all our products rely on: object storage, relational databases, key-value stores, and caches. We help Sentry engineers store and access data consistently, durably, securely, and efficiently as our products and traffic grow.

We develop storage services like our open-source Objectstore and build libraries and APIs that make existing storage systems easier to use. In our own services, we design storage protocols that keep data consistent across backends, even through concurrent updates and failures. Our abstractions let other engineering teams use storage without worrying about which cluster or instance holds their data.

As a Senior Software Engineer on the team, you’ll work on both the systems and the code that makes them easy to use. You’ll tackle questions of data consistency, availability, performance, and cost-efficiency, and work with product teams to turn their needs into practical solutions. The goal is simple: make the right way to store data the easy and obvious way.

In this role you will

Design and operate storage systems used across Sentry, including their configuration and performance tuning.

Create APIs and abstractions that make storage easy for product teams to use, with best practices for correctness, security, and scale built in.

Solve storage challenges at scale, including consistency under concurrent access, sharding and rebalancing, and routing reads and writes across storage backends as workloads grow.

Work with product engineers to choose storage approaches, plan safe migrations, and help teams adopt the tools you build.

Plan and build with other Platform and Infrastructure teams, including analytical storage and streaming, to deliver a complete, fault-tolerant platform for product teams. Align roadmaps and standards, and design for failures and recovery.

Improve storage performance and cost efficiency by making better use of backends and resources, while keeping the platform simple for product teams.

Write code primarily in Rust and Python, with clear user-facing documentation. Develop advanced testing scenarios, such as production-scale chaos tests covering backend and infrastructure outages.

Own latency and availability SLOs for your services, improve monitoring and incident response, and participate in the team’s on-call rotation.

You’ll love this job if you

Enjoy digging into the internals of storage systems and understanding how they behave when traffic grows, requests race, or a dependency has a bad day.

Care about a useful, easy-to-use API as much as what happens behind it.

Like working with other engineers to understand their needs and make their day-to-day work easier.

Want to follow your work from design and code through rollout and production for millions of developers.

Want open-source contributions to be at the center of your day job.

Qualifications

5+ years of software engineering experience building and operating distributed, stateful systems in production.

Hands-on experience with object storage, relational databases, and caching systems at production scale. Experience with key-value or wide-column stores is a plus.

An understanding of distributed systems fundamentals, including consistency, concurrency, and what happens when requests fail or need to be retried.

Proficiency in a systems language such as Go, C++, Java, or Rust, and comfort working in Python. We primarily use Rust and Python, and welcome engineers who are new to Rust.

Experience running services on Kubernetes in a cloud environment, including observability, SLOs, and incident response. Familiarity with Terraform is a plus.

Good written and spoken English, especially in explaining technical choices and writing documentation.

Nice to have: experience building shared libraries or internal APIs, migrating data between systems, or improving system performance and cost.

The base salary range (or hourly wage range, if applicable) that Sentry reasonably expects to pay for this position is $190,000 to $400,000 USD. A successful candidate’s actual base salary (or hourly wage) amount will be determined by a variety of relevant factors including, without limitation, the candidate’s work location, education, work and other relevant experience, skills, and job-related knowledge. A successful candidate will be eligible to participate in Sentry’s employee benefit plans/programs applicable to the candidate’s position (including incentive compensation, equity grants, paid time off, and group health insurance coverage). See Sentry Benefits for more details about the Company’s benefit plans/programs.

Equal Opportunity at Sentry

Sentry is committed to providing equal employment opportunities to its employees and candidates for employment regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity, veteran status, or other legally-protected characteristic. This commitment includes the provision of reasonable accommodations to employees and candidates for employment with physical or mental disabilities who require such accommodations in order to (a) perform the essential functions of their jobs, or (b) seek employment with Sentry. We strive to build a diverse team, with an inclusive culture where every teammate can thrive. Sentry is an open-source company because we believe that everyone, everywhere, should have the ability and tools to make great software. Software should be accessible. That starts with making our industry accessible.

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Commuter Stipend

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Professional Development Stipend

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Charitable Matching Program

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Flexible PTO

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we still pay.