Software Engineer, Spark Platform

DoorDash USA; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 131,000 - 192,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

401(k) plan with employer matching

Paid parental leave

Wellness benefits

Commuter benefits match

Paid time off & paid sick leave

Medical, dental, and vision benefits

Job summary

DoorDash is seeking a Software Engineer for the Spark Platform to own and optimize our in-house Spark deployment across company workloads. You will work on runtime upgrades, multi-tenant scheduling, and Kubernetes-based cluster management while collaborating with platform consumers across the company.

The role requires hands-on experience with distributed systems at scale, Spark ecosystems (EMR/Databricks/in-house), and strong Kubernetes operations.

Qualifications

• BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science or equivalent.
• 2+ years of industry experience operating production distributed systems.
• Experience operating Apache Spark at scale on EMR, Databricks, or an in-house deployment with a focus on platform operations (runtime upgrades, cluster lifecycle, shuffle, observability, multi-tenant scheduling).
• Hands-on experience operating production systems on Kubernetes—controllers, operators, custom resources, and the failure modes that show up in multi-tenant clusters.
• Familiarity with batch or big-data schedulers (YuniKorn, Volcano, Kueue, or equivalent) and/or with the Spark-on-Kubernetes operator.
• Familiarity with observability stacks (Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, distributed tracing, structured logging) and with defining SLOs and SLIs that change team behavior.
• Comfort working in a cloud environment (AWS preferred) — VPC networking, instance lifecycle, spot/preemptible markets, and autoscaling primitives.
• Professional experience with Python, Go, Scala, or Java; SQL fluency.
• A bias toward incremental rollout, measurement, and reducing toil.
• You are located or willing to relocate to the Bay Area, Seattle, or NYC.

Responsibilities

• Build and operate an in-house Spark platform that runs at company-wide scale, spanning runtime, scheduler, reliability, and user-facing tooling.
• Drive multi-tenant scheduling, executor bin-packing, and cost-aware placement that let a small team serve dozens of consumer teams.
• Own pieces of cluster lifecycle automation — provisioning, upgrades, capacity changes, and node-failure handling — at a scale where these stop being manual events.
• Build the observability and incident automation that make the platform debuggable end-to-end and keep on-call sustainable as the team and the workload grow.
• Partner with senior engineers on shuffle, runtime, and architecture work, and grow into deeper ownership of those areas over time.

Skills

Distributed systems

Spark

Python

SQL

Java

Education

Bachelor's/MS/PhD in Computer Science or equivalent

Tools

Kubernetes

Spark-on-Kubernetes

Prometheus

OpenTelemetry

Databricks

Amazon EMR

Job description

San Francisco, CA; Sunnyvale, CA; Seattle, WA; New York City, NY

About the Team

The Spark Platform team owns and operates DoorDash's Apache Spark ecosystem — the execution runtime, remote shuffle service, cluster scheduler, and reliability tooling that powers the company's data, analytics, and ML workloads. We run Spark across the company at significant scale and continue to expand the workloads, capabilities, and consumer base we serve. Orchestrating and operating thousands of Spark cluster deployments is a complex distributed system problem which the team invests heavily in runtime optimization, systems architecture, multi-tenant scheduling, and end-user tooling.

About the Role

As a Software Engineer on Spark Platform, you will execute across the surfaces of our in-house Spark deployment that serves the entire company. The work spans Spark runtime upgrades and performance, multi-tenant scheduling and executor bin-packing on Kubernetes, cluster lifecycle automation, and the observability and incident automation that keep the platform sustainable. You will move between layers as the work demands — picking up the next high-leverage problem regardless of where it sits — and partner closely with the rest of the team and with platform consumers across the company.

You must be located in San Francisco, Sunnyvale, Seattle, or New York City for this hybrid position. You will report into the Engineering Manager on our Spark Platform team.

You're excited about this opportunity because you will…

• Build and operate an in-house Spark platform that runs at company-wide scale, spanning runtime, scheduler, reliability, and user-facing tooling.
• Drive multi-tenant scheduling, executor bin-packing, and cost-aware placement that let a small team serve dozens of consumer teams.
• Own pieces of cluster lifecycle automation — provisioning, upgrades, capacity changes, and node-failure handling — at a scale where these stop being manual events.
• Build the observability and incident automation that make the platform debuggable end-to-end and keep on-call sustainable as the team and the workload grow.
• Partner with senior engineers on shuffle, runtime, and architecture work, and grow into deeper ownership of those areas over time.

We're excited about you because…

• B.S., M.S., or PhD in Computer Science or equivalent.
• 2+ years of industry experience operating production distributed systems.
• Experience operating Apache Spark at scale on Amazon EMR, Databricks, or an in-house deployment — with a focus on platform operations (runtime upgrades, cluster lifecycle, shuffle, observability, multi-tenant scheduling) rather than authoring individual Spark jobs.
• Hands-on experience operating production systems on Kubernetes — controllers, operators, custom resources, and the failure modes that show up in multi-tenant clusters.
• Familiarity with batch or big-data schedulers (YuniKorn, Volcano, Kueue, or equivalent) and/or with the Spark-on-Kubernetes operator.
• Familiarity with observability stacks (Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, distributed tracing, structured logging) and with defining SLOs and SLIs that change team behavior.
• Comfort working in a cloud environment (AWS preferred) — VPC networking, instance lifecycle, spot/preemptible markets, and autoscaling primitives.
• Professional experience with Python, Go, Scala, or Java; SQL fluency.
• A bias toward incremental rollout, measurement, and reducing toil.
• You are located or willing to relocate to the Bay Area, Seattle, or NYC.

Compensation

The successful candidate’s starting pay will fall within the pay range listed below and is determined based on job-related factors including, but not limited to, skills, experience, qualifications, work location, and market conditions. Base salary is localized according to an employee’s work location. Ranges are market-dependent and may be modified in the future.

In addition to base salary, the compensation for this role includes opportunities for equity grants. Talk to your recruiter for more information.

DoorDash cares about you and your overall well-being. That’s why we offer a comprehensive benefits package to all regular employees, which includes a 401(k) plan with employer matching, 16 weeks of paid parental leave, wellness benefits, commuter benefits match, paid time off and paid sick leave in compliance with applicable laws (e.g. Colorado Healthy Families and Workplaces Act). DoorDash also offers medical, dental, and vision benefits, 11 paid holidays, disability and basic life insurance, family-forming assistance, and a mental health program, among others.

To learn more about our benefits, visit our careers page here .

See below for paid time off details:

• For salaried roles: flexible paid time off/vacation, plus 80 hours of paid sick time per year.
• For hourly roles: vacation accrued at about 1 hour for every 25.97 hours worked (e.g. about 6.7 hours/month if working 40 hours/week; about 3.4 hours/month if working 20 hours/week), and paid sick time accrued at 1 hour for every 30 hours worked (e.g. about 5.8 hours/month if working 40 hours/week; about 2.9 hours/month if working 20 hours/week).

The national base pay range for this position within the United States, including Illinois and Colorado.

$130,600 - $192,000 USD

About DoorDash

At DoorDash, our mission to empower local economies shapes how our team members move quickly, learn, and reiterate in order to make impactful decisions that display empathy for our range of users—from Dashers to merchant partners to consumers. We are a technology and logistics company that started by enabling door-to-door delivery, and we are looking for team members who can help us go from a company that is known as the place you order food to a company that people turn to for any and all goods. DoorDash is growing rapidly and changing constantly, which gives our team members the opportunity to share their unique perspectives, solve new challenges, and own their careers. We're committed to supporting employees’ happiness, healthiness, and overall well-being by providing comprehensive benefits and perks including premium healthcare, wellness expense reimbursement, paid parental leave and more.

Our Commitment to Diversity and Inclusion

We’re committed to growing and empowering a more inclusive community within our company, industry, and cities. That’s why we hire and cultivate diverse teams of people from all backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives. We believe that true innovation happens when everyone has room at the table and the tools, resources, and opportunity to excel.

Statement of Non-Discrimination: In keeping with our beliefs and goals, no employee or applicant will face discrimination or harassment based on: race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion, age, gender, marital/domestic partner status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, disability status, or veteran status. Above and beyond discrimination and harassment based on “protected categories,” we also strive to prevent other subtler forms of inappropriate behavior (i.e., stereotyping) from ever gaining a foothold in our office. Whether blatant or hidden, barriers to success have no place at DoorDash. We value a diverse workforce – people who identify as women, non-binary or gender non-conforming, LGBTQIA+, American Indian or Native Alaskan, Black or African American, Hispanic or Latinx, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, differently-abled, caretakers and parents, and veterans are strongly encouraged to apply. Thank you to the Level Playing Field Institute for this statement of non-discrimination.

Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, Los Angeles Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance, and any other state or local hiring regulations, we will consider for employment any qualified applicant, including those with arrest and conviction records, in a manner consistent with the applicable regulation.

If you need any accommodations, please inform your recruiting contact upon initial connection.

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As set forth in DoorDash’s Equal Employment Opportunity policy, we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.

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