Software Engineer, Storage - Distributed Caching

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

Benefits offered by this job

401k plan with employer matching

Paid parental leave

Wellness benefits

Commuter benefits match

Paid time off

Paid sick leave

Medical, dental, and vision benefits

11 paid holidays

Disability insurance

Life insurance

Family-forming assistance

Mental health program

Job summary

DoorDash is seeking a senior backend engineer to scale the caching stack and distributed storage services within the Storage organization. You will own high-leverage caching and locking systems, drive Boulder’s evolution, and re-platform the Distributed Lock Service for strong consistency.

The role is hybrid and requires proximity to San Francisco, Seattle, or the New York metro area. You will collaborate with cross-functional teams across DoorDash, Wolt, and Deliveroo, contributing to cost

Qualifications

• 6+ years of full-time experience designing, building, and operating distributed, stateful systems in production.
• Proficiency in Go, or Java/Kotlin with concurrency and backend expertise.
• Hands-on experience with distributed caching technologies and their failure modes: replication lag, failover, hot keys, cache invalidation.

Responsibilities

• Own high-leverage caching and locking services with direct operational impact: cost, latency, and reliability at multi million QPS scale.
• Build and scale Boulder, the KVRocks-backed key-value store, including sharding and domain isolation.
• Re-platform the Distributed Lock Service onto a strongly consistent backend with sharding.
• Contribute to standardized smart caching clients with failover, retry, and observability defaults.
• Diagnose production issues spanning cache invalidation storms, replication lag, and hot shards, turning fixes into durable guardrails.
• Collaborate with Taulu, ML Platform, and product engineering across DoorDash, Wolt, and Deliveroo.

Skills

Distributed systems

Go

Java/Kotlin

Distributed caching

Concurrency

AI coding tools

Tools

ElastiCache

Valkey

Memcached

KVRocks

Job description

About The Team

The Storage organization builds and operates the online stateful systems and abstractions that DoorDash Engineering depends on: reliable, efficient, secure, and easy to use. Within Storage, the Distributed Caching team owns every caching offering at DoorDash end to end, including ElastiCache (Redis/Valkey), Boulder (our KVRocks-based key-value store for high-QPS feature serving), Entity Cache (read Bill Shen’s engineering blog post, “High-Performance Proxy Cache for DoorDash Services”), and the Distributed Lock Service, plus the smart clients (asgard-redis, valkey-go) that sit in front of them. These systems back critical product surfaces across DoorDash, Wolt, and Deliveroo: the team runs roughly 400 ElastiCache clusters serving hundreds of millions of GET requests per second in aggregate, and Boulder, our offline-to-online feature store, serves billions of feature lookups per second at peak.

About The Role

The team owns provisioning of clusters and the smart clients that sit in front of them, baking in sensible defaults so that other engineering teams get a turnkey caching solution instead of having to run their own. You'll help drive Boulder's evolution to scale further, improve cost efficiency, enhance performance, and support real-time updates; re-platform the Distributed Lock Service onto a strongly consistent backend; and build the self-serve tooling and recommendation engine that let customers describe a workload (QPS, TTL, payload size, latency profile) and get the right backend without talking to a human.

You must be located in San Francisco, Seattle, or the New York Metro Area for this hybrid position. You will report to the Engineering Manager on the Distributed Caching team within the Storage organization.

You're Excited About This Opportunity Because You Will…

• 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 to 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.

We're Excited About You Because…

• You have 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.
• You are proficient in Go, or Java/Kotlin with deep expertise in concurrency, distributed systems, and production-grade backend services.
• You have 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.
• You understand distributed systems fundamentals: consistency models, sharding and partitioning, replication, and consensus, and can reason about their trade-offs from first principles.
• You have built or operated systems that require careful capacity planning and cost discipline at scale, and you default to right-sizing over over-provisioning.
• You thrive in an execution-driven environment with a broad ownership area and a proven track record of shipping reliable infrastructure end to end.
• You have 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.

Preferred

• Hands-on experience with ElastiCache, Memcached, or Valkey in production.
• Experience with KVRocks or RocksDB-family embedded storage engines (TiKV or similar), including compaction tuning and back-pressure handling.
• Experience building or operating a distributed lock service.
• Experience with Kubernetes and general cloud infrastructure operations.
• Contributions to open-source caching, storage, or distributed systems projects.

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.

$159,800—$235,000 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.