Staff Engineer, Service Architecture

The worldwide data management software market is massive (IDC forecasts it to be $136 billion by 2027!). At MongoDB we are transforming industries and empowering developers to build amazing apps that people use every day. We are the leading developer data platform and the first database provider to IPO in over 20 years. Join our team and be at the forefront of innovation and creativity.

Join and be a part of leading the MongoDB Service Architecture team, helping build the core of a distributed database! Our team focuses on creating and enhancing components which facilitate communication all within a single process, between cooperating distributed processes, and between the database and the operating system. Service Architecture’s responsibilities include, but are not limited to, maintaining MongoDB networking and command dispatch systems, improving the programming model, and building low level reusable software components that can be leveraged by other teams working on the database.

Our team currently consists of twelve engineers, half located in New York City and half fully remote. We operate close to the bottom of the stack, and have a lot of influence over the performance and robustness of our open source database as well as the development efficiency of the engineering team overall. Recently we’ve worked on testing the performance of various memory allocators, introducing a new networking stack, and thinking about cluster workload management to better handle our customers at scale.

Are you excited to help the MongoDB engineering team build a better database? We are! Join us today, and we can build a faster, more reliable, exceptionally observable, database system together.

Note: This role can be based out of our NYC office or remotely from anywhere in North America.

Candidate Profile

• 10+ years of experience building distributed systems, including extensive experience with networking
• Experience with building production-level code with a large user base, robust design structure and rigorous code quality, written in C++ or another systems programming language
• Degree in Computer Science or similar field, or equivalent practical experience, with strong competencies in data structures, algorithms, and software design/architecture
• Passion for the theory and practice of system design for large-scale distributed systems, as well as hands-on or academic experience in the domain
• Understands modern computer architecture and internals to the degree that they can reason about how specific design choices plays out in a system like MongoDB
• Has demonstrated industry success or academic research in areas such as:
• High performance / low latency networking
• Performance tuning
• Rearchitecting highly available and scalable distributed systems (eg: decoupling storage and compute, improving cluster elasticity and utilization)

Position Expectations

• Research state-of-the art distributed systems architecture to inform our design
• Leverage deep knowledge of the strength and weakness of the product and the industry trends to provide technical vision and direction
• Set initiative level strategy, architect plan and lead team towards successful execution
• Advise management on decisions related to roadmap, processes, architecture and design
• You'll need to trace down defects, estimate work complexity, and design evolution and integration strategies as we rewrite different components of the system
• Identify, design, implement, test, and support new features related to networking, intra/inter-process communication, performance and observability in a large feature-rich C++ codebase
• Assist fellow engineers in, and be an advocate for, writing secure, robust, well-reasoned industrial-strength software
• Work with other teams including client drivers, cloud services, enterprise tools, support, consulting, education, and marketing to coordinate changes or contribute to their projects
• Positively influence and grow team members through active mentoring, coaching and leading by example

Success Measures

• In three months you’ll have contributed to the development of a project slated for the next major version of MongoDB, as well as fixed a few bugs in a minor version of our latest stable release series; You'll have learned about MongoDB's project lifecycle, and our long-term goals for the system
• In six months, you’ll have taken on code review responsibilities and are playing an active role in drafting and reviewing the design for new features; You have expanded the team's horizons by presenting a favorite paper or system related to distributed systems architecture
• In twelve months, on the basis of your extensive past experience in the large-scale distributed systems programming s