Software Engineer, Traffic

About the role

You will design and build large-scale distributed systems that are high RPS and latency sensitive within the Traffic platform. The role involves troubleshooting, debugging, and fixing issues that affect production while actively maintaining our strict SLAs. You will collaborate closely with other platform and product engineers to deliver on feature requests and solve complex infrastructure problems. A key part of the role includes finding ways to improve the team's productivity and operational capabilities through the use of automation and modern AI tools. You will participate in a shared on-call rotation and lead production investigations and incidents when needed. This position focuses on building and maintaining the critical traffic infrastructure that powers communication across thousands of services. You will report to the Engineering Manager of the Traffic Team within the Infrastructure organization.

Key facts

What you'll do

Design and build core components of the traffic stack, including the Envoy Data Plane, xDS control planes, and proxyless architecture.

Troubleshoot, debug, and fix issues that affect production traffic and maintain our stringent SLAs.

Collaborate with platform and product engineers to translate business requirements into scalable infrastructure solutions.

Improve team productivity and operational capabilities through automation, observability, and AI-assisted development workflows.

Participate in shared on-call rotations and lead post-incident investigations for traffic-related outages.

Design systems that must operate reliably and efficiently across some of the most critical and latency-sensitive workloads at DoorDash.

Work on ingress systems that handle external traffic entering the DoorDash platform globally.

Partner with SRE and infrastructure teams to ensure the stability and performance of the traffic platform.

Implement and maintain control plane logic for service discovery, routing, and configuration delivery.

Drive the adoption of best practices for networking, security, and reliability across the traffic stack.

Contribute to architectural decisions that impact the scalability and resilience of the global logistics engine.

Engage in code reviews and knowledge sharing to elevate the overall engineering standards of the team.

Requirements

You have 5+ years of experience as a software engineer in infrastructure, networking, or platform engineering.

You possess experience with programming languages such as Go, C++, Python, or Rust.

You have hands-on experience with AWS and Kubernetes in production environments.

You have a background working on and debugging high-QPS or latency-sensitive systems.

You are curious, independent, ambitious, and can find solutions in ambiguous and challenging environments.

You demonstrate proficiency in using AI coding tools such as Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor throughout the software development lifecycle.

You have a strong understanding of networking fundamentals including TCP/IP, HTTP, HTTP/2, gRPC, and load balancing.

You are comfortable designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems that require high availability.

Nice to have

Experience with service mesh technologies such as Envoy, Istio, or Linkerd.

Familiarity with xDS control plane architectures and protocols.

Solid understanding of networking fundamentals like load balancing and proxyless architectures.

Experience building RPC frameworks or client-side networking libraries.

Experience with AWS networking primitives such as Load Balancers and PrivateLink.

Experience with Infrastructure as Code tooling like Terraform.

Experience with GitOps delivery tooling such as ArgoCD, Helm, or Atlantis.

Practical notes

This role is hybrid and allows work from one of our engineering hubs based in the San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, or New York.

Applicants for jobs located in New York City or remote roles associated with an office in New York City only are subject to additional hiring considerations.

We use Covey as part of our hiring and/or promotional process for jobs in NYC and certain features may qualify it as an AEDT in NYC.

As part of the hiring and/or promotion process, we provide Covey with job requirements and candidate submitted applications.

We began using Covey Scout for Inbound from August 21, 2023, through December 21, 2023, and we may use it for future similar hiring needs.

You must be authorized to work in the country where the position is located.

This job description is intended to provide a general overview of the position and is not an exhaustive list of responsibilities. Duties and responsibilities may change based on business needs, and we may adjust this at any time.

DoorDash is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.