Software Engineer, Database Infrastructure

About the role

Gusto seeks an infrastructure engineer to define how the company stores and accesses data as the business scales. The role focuses on building platforms that allow engineering teams to provision new datastores and evaluate storage systems that are highly available and horizontally scalable. The position involves strengthening the resilience of existing databases and shaping the technology choices underlying Gusto's storage layer. The team responsible for datastores designs, builds, and operates the data platforms behind Gusto's products, including Kafka, MySQL, Postgres, and Redis. As Gusto grows, the team is rethinking how the rest of engineering provisions and accesses storage. This includes building self-service tooling for new datastores, exploring highly available and horizontally scalable systems, and reducing blast radius while improving database resilience. The role requires deep ownership of streaming infrastructure and the evaluation of non-relational systems to ensure they meet the demands of production at scale.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Drive the design and operation of data platforms that empower engineering teams to provision new datastores with confidence and speed.
• Evaluate and pilot highly available, horizontally scalable storage systems to determine the best fit for Gusto's long-term scalability requirements.
• Own the full lifecycle of Kafka, including capacity planning, partitioning strategies, performance tuning, and ensuring reliability at scale.
• Stand up and operate new non-relational datastores such as DynamoDB, ensuring they are reliable, performant, and secure in production environments.
• Coordinate migrations and topology changes across the datastore platform, which encompasses MySQL, Postgres, Redis, and Kafka, with minimal disruption to production systems.
• Drive efficiency and reliability improvements through query optimization, consumer tuning, caching strategies, and intelligent workload management.
• Implement and enforce automation and standards that uphold data consistency, integrity, and security across all storage systems.
• Participate actively in on-call responsibilities, driving long-term reductions in operational burden and improving incident response processes.
• Partner closely with product engineering teams to enable rapid, reliable product development and share knowledge to grow collective expertise across the organization.
• Continuously explore emerging storage technologies and patterns to solve complex infrastructure problems at scale.
• Collaborate with cross-functional stakeholders to translate business requirements into robust, scalable data infrastructure solutions.
• Champion best practices for database operations, guiding the organization in standards that enhance performance and resilience.

Requirements

• Bring 6+ years of software engineering experience focused on building and operating large-scale infrastructure systems that power critical production workloads.
• Demonstrate deep hands-on expertise in streaming infrastructure, specifically Kafka, including configuration, scaling, and troubleshooting in complex environments.
• Show proven experience with non-relational datastores such as DynamoDB, managing them in production at scale and optimizing their performance.
• Possess a strong understanding of distributed systems fundamentals, including partitioning, replication, consistency models, and failure modes, to design resilient systems.
• Have a track record of coordinating migrations or topology changes in production environments while maintaining stability and minimizing disruption.
• Hold experience running production infrastructure in the cloud, managing caching systems like Redis and streaming platforms like Kafka with high reliability.
• Exhibit a history of driving infrastructure optimization at scale, balancing cost, performance, and operational efficiency.
• Communicate effectively to simplify technical complexity and collaborate on technical direction across diverse teams and stakeholders.
• Operate comfortably in an AI-native environment, leveraging AI tooling to enhance query optimization, performance evaluation, and infrastructure automation.
• Show curiosity and the ability to learn quickly as technology evolves, adapting to new tools, patterns, and challenges in the storage landscape.
• Thrive in a fast-paced setting, balancing multiple priorities while maintaining a strong focus on reliability and execution.
• Collaborate with engineers at all levels to mentor and share knowledge, elevating the overall capability of the database infrastructure community.

Practical notes

Employment is authorized only for individuals authorized to work in the United States. No sponsorship is available for this position at this time.

The role is based in San Francisco, California, with standard business hours expectations.

This position requires on-call rotation as part of the operational responsibilities.