- 9+ years of strong software engineering experience, including significant hands-on experience designing and building distributed systems, backend infrastructure, or large-scale data platforms, with demonstrated Staff-level technical impact.
- Strong software engineering background with experience designing and building production infrastructure, not only operating or administering it.
- Experience architecting systems handling multi-terabyte datasets and 30K–50K+ operations per second, or comparable large-scale distributed workloads.
- Deep understanding of distributed systems concepts, including partitioning, sharding, replication, consistency, concurrency, fault tolerance, and data distribution.
- Strong hands-on experience with both relational and NoSQL database architectures, including their design principles, scalability characteristics, and trade-offs.
- Experience leading complex architectural initiatives involving multiple systems and engineering teams.
Ability to identify systemic technical problems and design solutions that improve infrastructure across the organization.
- Strong technical judgment, ownership, and the ability to influence architectural decisions without formal authority.
Tech Experience
We value engineering depth and architectural understanding over familiarity with a long list of technologies.
Strong experience with relational databases such as MySQL or PostgreSQL, combined with experience in one or more distributed database technologies such as MongoDB, Cassandra, DynamoDB, or similar systems, is highly relevant.
Experience with distributed SQL, search infrastructure, analytical databases, or other large-scale storage systems is an advantage.
We do not expect expertise in any particular combination of database products. What matters is the ability to understand their internals, evaluate trade-offs, and design scalable infrastructure around them.
What Makes Someone Successful in This Role
You have previously taken ownership of challenging infrastructure problems where the solution required more than improving an individual service or database.
You have designed or significantly evolved distributed architectures, built infrastructure adopted by multiple teams, led complex technical transformations, or enabled systems to operate at substantially greater scale.
You are equally comfortable discussing database internals, distributed systems trade-offs, and long-term architecture as you are working with engineers to turn those decisions into production systems.
Your impact is measured by the systems you enable, the architectural problems you eliminate, and the engineering capabilities you leave behind.