Staff Engineer Distributed Storage and Transaction

Role Overview

As a Staff Engineer on the Distributed Storage & Transactions (DST) team, you will play a critical role in designing, building, and scaling the core distributed storage, replication, and transaction foundations of YugabyteDB.

You will work on challenging problems in distributed systems — including consistency, durability, fault tolerance, performance, and scalability — while collaborating closely with query layer, platform, and cloud teams.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the design, development, testing, and delivery of core storage and replication features in YugabyteDB.
• Write high-quality C/C++ code with comprehensive automated tests; actively participate in design discussions and code reviews.
• Troubleshoot and resolve correctness, stability, and performance issues in complex distributed storage and transactional subsystems.
• Improve database scalability and throughput as cluster sizes, data volumes, and transaction rates continue to grow.
• Build and streamline database management operations, including horizontal cluster scale-out, incremental and point-in-time backups, online schema/index operations, and rolling upgrades/blue-green deployments.
• Identify and implement performance improvements across the storage engine, transaction processing, and replication layers.
• Contribute to the open-source YugabyteDB project, helping evolve its storage architecture and operational reliability.
• Mentor and technically influence other engineers in distributed systems design, performance engineering, and systems-level debugging.

Required Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a strong foundation in systems programming using C/C++.
• Bachelor’s, Master’s, or PhD in Computer Science (or related field), or equivalent practical experience.
• Deep understanding of distributed systems fundamentals, including replication and consensus, transactions and consistency models, and fault tolerance and recovery.
• Experience working on storage engines, databases, or other infrastructure-level systems.
• Strong problem-solving skills and the ability to operate effectively in a collaborative, distributed team environment.

Preferred Skills

• Hands-on experience with distributed storage systems, transactional engines, or consensus protocols.
• Familiarity with LSM-tree based storage engines, WALs, snapshots, or compaction strategies.
• Experience with PostgreSQL internals or other relational database engines is a strong plus.
• Prior contributions to open-source systems or database projects.